“Fury,” a fictional account of an American tank crew fighting in Germany in April of 1945, is one of the great war movies—right near the top, within range of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) and other classics. Spielberg’s film, after its tremendous early sequence devoted to the D-Day landings, turns into a platoon movie—a grander version of the pictures made during and after the Second World War in which an ethnically (though not racially) mixed, highly individualized group of Americans (Wasp, Jew, Italian, etc.) triumphs over anonymous Fascist helots. “Fury,” written and directed by David Ayer, is a genre movie, too: five guys in a tank, led by Sergeant Don Collier (Brad Pitt), fight desperate battles against the Germans, in ravaged fields and along country roads. When the men aren’t fighting, they try to come down from the nauseating exhilaration of combat. They curse, pray, and bash each other around, but the horseplay is no more than a temporary release from the grim wariness they display the rest of the time. The movie’s prevailing coloring is shrouded browns and grays, mixed with clouds of white (smoke from exploding shells), bursts of flame, and the glowing flight of shells and tracer bullets. “Fury” is literally visceral—a kind of war horror film, which is, of course, what good combat films should be.
In just a few weeks, the war will be over. The Americans know they will triumph, but the Germans fight to defend every last acre of their homeland. The S.S. hangs citizens who won’t join the struggle and leaves their bodies dangling from posts along the roadside. An extremely unpleasant irony is built into “Fury”: the Americans are a winning army, but, half-terrorized themselves, they feel like a losing army. A tank crew faces special nightmares. With its many guns and its crushing weight, a tank destroys everything in its path—right up to the point at which enemy tanks or artillery threaten to turn it into a furnace. The four men and Collier (or Top, as the crew calls him) fight in a Sherman M4, which is fast and maneuverable but only lightly armored. (It was known in the Army as “the Ronson lighter”—it lit up easily when hit.) The new German Panzers, especially the Tiger II, are heavy and slow but protected with thick plate and outfitted with a long-range, armor-piercing gun.
At the beginning of “Fury,” Top and his crew drag themselves out of their vehicle; they are the only survivors in a meadow of burned-out Shermans. A few days later, in the most nerve-racking battle in the film, they try to scuttle around a Tiger to get a shot at its more vulnerable rear. In this and other scenes, David Ayer, who wrote and directed the excellent cop-buddy movie “End of Watch” (2012), maintains the continuity and the coherence of space which make an action movie work emotionally for an audience. Ayer depends on digital special effects, but he never deviates from what could be called the illusion of reality—which, in this case, is almost hallucinatory. Long stretches of the movie will remain in your mind, rather than slip into the digital abyss. The air is the air, gravity is gravity, and when you get hit by something you’re in serious trouble.
The interior of the Sherman is cramped and hazardous, with steel support beams, long gear shafts, a steering wheel, and lots of other obstacles, and the men can escape only through tiny hatches. In this mobile prison, Ayer, working with the cinematographer Roman Vasyanov and the editors Jay Cassidy and Dody Dorn, establishes his characters and energizes his actors. As the Sergeant, Brad Pitt, now fifty, squares his shoulders and hardens his voice; he brings the right weight to such portentous lines as “The dying’s not done, the killing’s not done.” This is a different performance from Pitt’s revelatory work as the father in Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” (2011). That man, who considers his life a failure, loves his sons blindly, with little idea of how to prevent his self-disappointment from spilling into punitive anger. But Top, a successful career warrior, is always alert. A natural psychologist, he draws on the strengths of each crew member to keep them all alive. Like Dana Andrews in this kind of movie seventy years ago, he’s an ideal leader, decisive and stoical, but with one difference: out of sight, kneeling by the side of a tank, he falls apart.
As the driver, Trini (Gordo) Garcia, Michael Peña expands his usual persona of a blunt truth-teller, and he’s never been more likable. Jon Bernthal plays the growling Grady (Coon-Ass) Travis, a Neanderthal with big ears and a high-standing brush cut, his limbs askew, as if God had granted him courage but not coördination. Shia LaBeouf, wearing a thick black mustache and spectacles, abandons his brash overgrown-boy routine. As the gunner, Boyd (Bible) Swan, he’s a tangle of violence and piety. The men’s conversation, mixing Biblical incantation and profanity, slang and shorthand, is not so much spoken as spat out; some of it is close to indecipherable. The crew has its own rhythm in everything it does. We are with them, and we are not with them.
At first, young Norman (Logan Lerman) thinks that he couldn’t possibly fit in. A pale and skinny kid, trained as a typist, he’s thrown into battle as the tank’s forward machine-gunner. He’s the audience’s surrogate—terrified, ignorant of combat, and nonviolent by nature—and he’s the one cliché in the movie, the heir to those gentle fellows (Gary Cooper’s Sergeant York, Audie Murphy’s Audie Murphy) who start off quietly but learn the higher wisdom of war, which is that you must kill, and kill well, or be killed. (Jeremy Davies’s Corporal Upham, in “Saving Private Ryan,” doesn’t learn the lesson, and freezes as his friend gets stabbed by a German soldier.) Ayer’s message is that war creates courage. Maybe, but I could have done without the scene in which Top makes Norman into a man and a soldier by forcing him to shoot a howling German prisoner. Such therapeutic lessons raise more questions (psychological damage? mercy?) than they settle.
But Ayer does something original with another typical scene: in a conquered town, Top and Norman barge into the apartment of two cowering women, the fortyish Irma (Anamaria Marinca) and her beautiful young cousin, Emma (Alicia von Rittberg). The men’s behavior is not chaste, but it’s not abusive, either. When the rest of the crew shows up, drunk, the ambiguities of lust, contempt, and respect for the defenseless play through a prolonged scene with many odd turns and surprises. The scene is tense in its own way, but it provides a gentler emotional tone, an altered rhythm, in a movie so obsessional and frightening that it makes a “tough” Second World War film like “To Hell and Back” (1955) look more like “To Heck and Back.”
No one really understands why General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German military governor of Occupied Paris, did not blow up the city in the summer of 1944. The war in France was in its final phase, the Allies were approaching, and Hitler wanted to leave nothing behind but rubble. Monuments, bridges, and museums were wired with explosives, yet Choltitz, who earlier in the war had followed orders to kill thousands of Russian Jews, never lit the fuse. On August 25th, he surrendered the German garrison to the Free French, leaving the city intact. What stopped him? We know that the Swedish consul-general in Paris, Raoul Nordling, who had spent most of his life in the city and loved it, had several meetings with Choltitz that August, during which he negotiated the release of political prisoners. Yet what happens in Volker Schlöndorff’s “Diplomacy”—an all-through-the-night confrontation between the two men, on the eve of the surrender—is essentially a fiction. Secretly entering Choltitz’s quarters at the Hotel Meurice, Nordling (André Dussollier) charms, cajoles, exhorts, and effectively blackmails the General (Niels Arestrup) into non-action.
The scenario is familiar from the 1966 film “Is Paris Burning?,” with Gert Fröbe as Choltitz and Orson Welles as Nordling. The principal suspense in this fascinating movie is generated by the polite, and then not so polite, ferocity of the arguments between the two men. “Diplomacy” was first a play, by the French writer Cyril Gély (who did the screen adaptation with Schlöndorff), and Arestrup and Dussollier created their roles onstage. There’s little pretense that the movie is much more than a filmed play, but the intimate camerawork allows us to see each man’s point of view as he watches the other for an opening. The ferocious Arestrup, with his intimidating upper lip and his outraged glare, makes the General a Prussian aristocrat who is contemptuous of weakness and death. But Choltitz has a quirk, which Arestrup plays to the hilt: he has an asthma attack every time he has to decide the fate of the city. Dussollier, who has one of the great French film voices, guttural yet smooth, powers through the role of a life-loving man who can be both insinuating and ruthless.
By implication, the movie presents an argument between civilization and barbarism, between the pleasure principle and the death instinct. But the filmmakers mostly avoid high-flown rhetoric in favor of the intensely practical give-and-take of negotiation. Schlöndorff, dedicating the movie to the late Richard Holbrooke, makes a case that diplomacy can solve the most intricately knotted problems. As Hemingway wrote, in a slightly different context, it would be pretty to think so. ♦
