Image: Columbia Pictures
Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña and Jon Bernthal in 'Fury'
Whether or not war is hell isn’t really an interesting question. The jury is back on that one: the answer is yes.
But why do (some) people voluntarily enter that hell? Why do some others survive when they have that hell thrust upon them? These are harder but—in some ways—more important questions.
Image: Columbia Pictures
Logan Lerman and Brad Pitt in 'Fury'
Fury documents the transformation of one normal man (“Norman”) into a killing machine. Depending upon your point of view, Norman’s (Logan Lerman) change is either a painfully slow education (during which others pay with their lives for his mistakes and reservations) or a shockingly rapid degeneration. The man who originally asks for his own death rather than to be forced to kill an enemy eventually takes to violence with a cathartic energy that horrifies him and us alike.
The film echoes Lawrence of Arabia’s tragically sad admission that the hardest thing about killing a man is the realization that one enjoyed it. But it also houses another even more cruel conundrum: in war, the best chance of saving your life is surrendering your humanity.
For a while, Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) fools Norman, and us, into thinking we can have it both ways. That we can hold on to decency, some sort of code—even one peculiar to war—and still execute with skill and efficiency the destruction of other human beings. Just as Norman, straight out of the typing pool, wants no part of the tank unit, Collier wants no part of Norman.
But Collier is a soldier following orders, so he can’t choose to leave Norman behind. When Norman is reluctant to kill—and it costs another man his life—Collier refuses to let him look away from the consequences. When even that is not enough, he commands Norman to execute a prisoner of war, literally restraining the fellow soldier and forcibly putting the gun in his hand.
The execution is a bravura scene, made all the more harrowing because each character’s internal logic is frightfully clear. The Fury tank may be killing Nazis, but the real antagonist is war itself. The Nazis can eventually be defeated; war looks and feels like a more invincible foe—at least so long as we live in a fallen world.
If that sounds too abstract, too much like liberal pacifist hand-wringing, let me add that much of Fury’s brilliance comes because it gives the pro-war arguments their due. Rarer still, it allows those who represent different philosophies recognize and empathize with each other. Too often the anti-violence pacifist fails to recognize or acknowledge the soldier’s nobility—and then we get Full Metal Jacket. Or in the rush to honor the military and defend the use of force, the artist and critic forgets that though pacifist ideals are inconvenient on the battlefield, they are a part of the civilization that the soldier is risking his life to preserve—and we get Team America: World Police.
Those aren’t necessarily bad films, but it is rare to see a war film embrace and embody ambiguity and doubt. Norman’s ideals are a threat to the company’s safety, and they are treated as such. (“You are no g*dd**n good to me unless you can kill Krauts.”) But Collier also recognizes that war has dehumanized his comrades and is—despite his best efforts—dehumanizing him. (“We’re not here for right and wrong; we’re here to kill Krauts.”)
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