Fury (2014)

Film: Fury (2014)
Stars: Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, Jon Bernthal
Director: David Ayer
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Brad Pitt, in my opinion, is the best actor currently working in the movies.  I realized the other day that I have seen every live-action film that Pitt has made, save one, for the past ten years, and I saw them all in theaters I was excited enough to watch them (for the record, the holdout was Ocean's Thirteen, and I stand by my decision).  Whether it's the haunted father of The Tree of Life or the bizarrely-coiffed trainer of Burn After Reading or his Oscar-nominated work as a chill baseball scout in Moneyball, Pitt consistently finds a soul and a real purpose behind his characters, resulting in one of the longest streaks of strong performances I've seen from an actor in eons.  And that streak continues in David Ayer's Fury, a film that occasionally trips over itself in terms of plot but is buoyed by strong central performances and yet another fascinating chapter in the "War is Hell" saga that the cinema continues to investigate.

(Spoilers Ahead) Told in the waning days of World War II, the film is about a crew of Americans who have been together for most of the war, operating a tank and battling the Nazis.  The fascinating conundrum of the war is that we, the audience, know that they're winning.  It's an interesting chapter to add to the war-there is clearly a victor and a loser at this point, and we as the audience are just waiting for Hilter to concede, and will he do it in time to save our small platoon.  That's one of the first things that is introduced to this group: the tick-tick-tick of time, and how they all are waiting for what will happen next.

The first half of the film is by far the superior half, principally because it shows the burgeoning, complicated dynamic between Wardaddy (Pitt) and the newest man in his charge, Norman (Lerman).  There's so many great scenes in this first half of the movie, and the really fascinating thing is how they treat certain cliches.  Norman, for example, has his requisite reluctant-to-kill moment which costs the life of another soldier, and Pitt's Wardaddy reams him for this.  We've seen this in other films, but because of the claustrophobia of the film (we rarely leave the focus of Pitt or Lerman's eyes), you see how excruciating this is-Lerman doesn't have much escape into the vast German countryside, he just sits in a hot tank all day, thinking, killing, and thinking about his killing (or lack thereof).  The claustrophobia comes across particularly well because Lerman knows how to utilize his youthful appearance and find a very realistic reaction to the war.  He had been a desk clerk, and the frustration in knowing the war is almost over, but he was still brought into Hell when it might not be necessary-the anger there is palpable and radiates from him every time he shakes in fury.

The first half also has one of the most fascinating detours in film this year-the much discussed dinner sequence.  In this scene, Wardaddy and Norman go in and meet two women in a German town that they had just ransacked.  The immediacy of this encounter, with the older woman trying to protect the virtue of her younger cousin Emma (von Rittberg) shows the isolation of war.  We don't think, particularly with World War II films, of the way that the war ravaged the German people, but of course it did, and you see the fear in these women's eyes.  Eventually Norman and Emma sleep together (the film is ambiguous on this front, but I'm going to guess that they do), and get a return to normalcy with some nice eggs for breakfast.  This is interrupted in a deeply uncomfortable fashion by the rest of the men of the platoon, who squash this return to normalcy with their machismo and lack of understanding of the situation.  It's easily the best scene in the movie, anchored by Pitt's calm-but-unshakable presence and Lerman's desire to return to his normalcy while still finding a more traditional and safer way to establish his masculinity.  Both actors knock this scene (and truly, most of their scenes) out of the park.

The second half of the film is a bit of a disaster, however, because it seems so horribly unnecessary (and not in the obvious "war is not necessary" sort of way).  The final stand-off between the crew and a group of German soldiers doesn't remotely jive with the interesting dinner scene.  That moment showed Wardaddy ready to hang up his guns and rejoin society, and yet here he is, ready and totally willing to kill himself and every person in his crew for, well, nothing.  The Americans are winning the war, they all know it-why stick around to fight a group of German soldiers knowing the war will be over in a matter of days, if not hours?  Go back, get more men, and then you can properly fight and win.  It's a bizarre and extremely convenient plot twist that makes no sense, and is followed by an even more bizarre and convenient change in Norman's perception of the war, as he far too quickly embraces his brothers-in-arms and shifts his view of the war in essentially a day or two, which seems unreasonably quick.

The entire second half is bad after a truly excellent first half, so I am teetering between two and three stars.  I'll go in with this caveat-the acting with the MAJOR exception of Jon Bernthal (who is scenery-chewing awful in his first major screen role) is almost uniformly good.  Lerman and Pitt are on fire as actors lately (I'll see either of them in pretty much anything) and Shia LaBeouf is quite strong as a bible-thumping soldier caught between his morals and his duty.  The cinematography is glossy and thanks to being shot on film this year has one of the most romantic uses of soft imagery I've seen in cinema in 2014.  And the dinner scene is just sublime.  So I'm going with three stars, but be warned that the plot enters seriously dated war cliche stuff in the second half, and is predictable in who lives and who dies.

Those were my thoughts on this film-how about yours?  Is anyone equally obsessed with Pitt and Lerman?  Did you also find the film's sharp detour in tone to be off-putting?  And where precisely will Shia LaBeouf take his career next?  Share in the comments!