Fury.

Lighter, Jonathan E.

Fine direction, throbbing subwoofers, and a screen bursting with detail make David Ayer's World War II film Fury (2014) a jolting movie-house experience, featuring a tank battle whose streams of armor-piercing tracers look like ray-gun combat in outer space. But is Fury anything more than that?

It's the tail-end of the war, and the defeat of Nazi Germany is imminent; the crumbling Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, however, continue to fight back savagely and without hope. As a serious film about this time, Fury is either a near-total--or else a splendid--artistic failure. Yet either way most of it is still a succes du cinema.

Even the "greatest" combat movies fail to impart a true sense of "what it was like"--a burden rarely placed on other genres--and only noncombatants are likely to call any combat movie unreservedly "great." Future novelist James Jones, for example, home from Guadalcanal in 1943, laughed out loud and walked out on Bataan, a movie whose qualities, at almost the same moment, much impressed the astute critic James Agee. But no one will laugh during the middle-film intensity of the well titled Fury. One reason is the convincing look of it, endorsed by Ayer's team of seven historical consultants. Not even Patton (1970) comes close. To the cinematically unprecedented visuals (and roaring audibles) of tank fighting, shock and awe--not to mention pity and terror--are the appropriate reactions. (Yet by World War II standards the five-tank showdown here is small potatoes.)

And pity and terror are what Fury is about, with the latter stimulating the former, an old move of sensationalist as well as tragedian. One wonders: what's this sound and fury about, particularly in its far-fetched opening and closing episodes? Impassioned antiwar statement or lurid "war porn"? Both, it seems, and some might wonder just where (or if) one ends and the other begins.

Ayer's portrait of sheer awfulness defamiliarizes land war in Europe as it has appeared in most feature films since Battleground (1949), which seemed sufficiently realistic in its day. Ayer's hyperrealism recalls that of the Italian journalist Malaparte's grotesque, only quasi-fictional war books Kaputt and The Skin; more apposite, though, is Lincoln Kirstein's poem, "Fourth Armored" (1966), which relates attitudes and events like those on the screen. Of Fury's central horrors, few seem implausible--though they're unlikely all to have happened to anybody in a single day and night, as Ayers has it.

Plausibility, however, is unnecessary to either "war porn" or highly expressive cinema, so before passing judgment we should explore a little further. The comicbook artificiality of the first ten minutes quickly gives way to a simple but riveting narrative: "Advance. Fight. Advance. Fight." And for an hour and more Ayer becomes a cinematic Svengali until he loses his thematic compass (or tips his cynical hand) in a gratuitous, unbelievable siege, a night-time Sahara on steroids. A piercing conclusion almost redeems him.

Fury is a combat initiation tale foregrounding Private Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman) as its bewildered nai'f, a clerk-typist yanked from a convoy to be assistant driver and bow machine-gunner in a Sherman tank ("Fury") of the U.S. Second Armored Division. The seasoned crew is led by Staff Sergeant Don Collier (Brad Pitt in a twenty-first century undercut, which complements the occasional cringeworthy verbal anachronism). Collier's crew (well played by Shia LaBeouf, Michael Pena, and Jon Bernthal) carries itself more like a street gang than like the regular Joes immortalized by Ernie Pyle. Which means only that Pyle was differently selective of those he usually chose to write about.

Collier seems once to have been a reflective individual, but now he is obsessed with the conflicting imperatives of the combat soldier: duty and survival. Duty prevails, but he is also driven by rage and concern in the film's most shocking sequence, turning into an especially vile sort of murderer--if "murderer" in Ayer's hell-vision retains any meaning. The scores of laughing GIs Ayers puts on the scene obviously don't think it does, nor apparently do any officers or MPs. Of Collier's civilian life, we get one hint, relevant and suggestive.

Ayer's best, chilling moments are deftly conceived. Leading tanks across a peaceful meadow, Collier sees through a break in the clouds a sky invaded by the contrails of a hundred bombers thundering toward their target. A few new trails come fanning out from the opposite direction. Collier barely notices: unlike us, how could he care about a battle in the sky?

The upshot comes much later, when the grinning moron Coon-Ass (Bernthal) points out to Norman great billows of smoke rising beyond a distant forest. "See that?" he gloats. "That's a whole city on fire." There is also an ominous, nerve-wracking episode with two young German women (Anamaria Malinca and Alicia von Rittberg): despite some pandering it is masterfully ambiguous and restrained. Ayer's fine touches persuade one to overlook his compartmentalized excesses as flaws in a striking gem, fodder for the groundlings that takes nothing away from the rest.

Whether he's cynically detached or passionately engaged, war for Ayer kills, brutalizes, or unhinges everyone it approaches. Nor is the boy who extends mercy at the story's end likely to escape his fate. Of American movies, Fury most resembles The Victors (1963), Carl Foreman's heavy-handed but daring, anti-Hollywood war film, which Fury's final aerial fade-out unmistakably evokes. But Fury excels The Victors as vivid indictment and grieving prophecy.

Heroism in this Grand Guignol is impossible, unless maintaining a remnant of decency and sanity is heroic. "I am the instrument. I am not the hand" gunner and ex-divinity student "Bible" Swan tells his conscience. Earlier, Swan (LaBeouf in the film's best performance), promised Norman, our stand-in, that war would show him "What a man can do to another man."

Norman then beholds the moral and material inferno that is meant.

There's nothing substantively new in Fury, but the equation of war and hell has rarely been expressed on screen with such powerful, factually supported images: a corpse crushed under tank treads, a GI on fire blowing out his own brains, an old woman carving meat from a bloated mare, civilians hanged by the SS for defeatism, a flood of refugees with nothing but the clothes on their backs--among them, vivid as the red dress in Schindler's List, a groomless bride in a muddied gown. And if Fury once or twice adopts horror-show devices, the irreducible difference (as well we know) is that horror shows are sadistic fantasy while Fury is a concentrate of the real thing, armor-piercing tracers and all. "History is violent," says Collier. Fury, high-functioning despite a self divided, drives that historical constant home unforgettably.