Brad Pitt at the heart of a concentrate of horror and heroism

OCS – TUESDAY JANUARY 14 AT 9:45 P.M. – FILM

Germany, April 1945. The crew of the “Fury” assault tank has just suffered its first loss. Until then, Wardaddy’s men – “war dad”, an affectionate nickname bestowed by the crew of his Sherman tank on Master Sergeant Don Collier (Brad Pitt) – have been preserved, by the courage and military science of their superior.

He has been in the war for just over two years. This is enough time to have made him a being of a species other than ordinary mortals, whose nickname could also be the name by which the divinity of battles is invoked. From the first sequence of FuryDavid Ayer, director and screenwriter, plays on this ambiguity which makes this remarkable and disturbing film come and go between historical memory and mythological imagination.

To replace the rifleman who died during the last clash with the panzers, the US Army found a clear-eyed teenager, Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), who thought he would spend the last months of the war typing.

The compact scenario follows the twenty-four hours that Ellison’s initiation will last, under the guidance of Wardaddy. At the first fight, the young man will flee; his mentor will force him to do his job as a soldier, which the non-commissioned officer summarizes as “kill Germans”forcing him to shoot a soldier who had just surrendered in the back. The crew will then take a few hours of rest in a city they have just conquered before the time for the final confrontation comes.

Effects of violence

There is nothing realistic in this concentration of horror and heroism. David Ayer, who was a soldier (submariner), is fascinated by the effects of professional violence on the human psyche. Masculine, more precisely: he gets rid of the only two female figures in the film without too much elegance. Ayer makes little distinction between peacetime policing and military operations. His first feature film, Bad Times (2005), had as its hero a veteran of the Eastern Wars, who, to get hired into the Los Angeles police, behaved in the streets of his city as in those of Baghdad.

With its classic and elegant staging, Fury wants to express the very essence of this paradox: those who are responsible for bringing order and justice must be ready to sacrifice their lives, but also their conscience, their integrity.

It is clever to have placed the film in the last hours of the war, at the moment when the Allied troops came into direct contact with Nazi terror, liberating the camps, sorting out the children forcibly recruited for the “total war » and the last battalions of a Nazified Wehrmacht. To put an end to this horror, we need people like Sergeant Collier and his men, who drive through a landscape of the Thirty Years’ War, where the corpses of traitors to the country hang from the street lamps – teenagers who refused to fight.

There was a time when Brad Pitt was promised the future of Robert Redford. He became John Wayne. Massive, laconic, he masters the art of war better than Patton and Rommel combined. He is a hero in the strict sense of the term.