FURY, WORLD WAR Z and the Tyler Durden Experience (Great 70s Dads: The Brad Pitt Edition)

The Pitt-staring 2013 zombie disaster film World War Z can help. I  may be the first film to actively redress the ongoing problem of what I call the Dads of Great Adventure, i.e. the ones who wind up with custody of their kids during the apocalypse because it happens to come on a weekend, and so they spend the movie trying to return them to the upscale hottie mom and the bland moneyed stepdad who's everything the deadbeat dad of great adventure is not, to an almost Ralph Bellamy-esque degree. As Gerry Lane in Z, Brad seems to be actively healing the fisher king wound left by these adventure dads. He's still married to the children's mother, and is competent and responsible for the world outside his immediate family as well as for said family, and the wife too, all are taken care of without over-protecting, sanctimoniously belittling, clinging, or simpering (or on the other side, ignoring, spacing, procrastinating, stalling). Pitt's professional compassion exonerates him from the usual sense of proximal guilt that trips up rubes like Cage in Knowing, Viggo in The Road, Cruise in War of the Worlds and Cusak in 2012. More than all of them, World War Z makes a genuine manly effort to show male viewers a kind of post-Fight Club code they can live by without feeling like second class citizens in their own home. Gerry Lane and family (including urchin collected en route) are choppered off to an aircraft carrier packed with refugees, so he can jet off to help a doctor locate Patient Zero. A global journey takes him from South Korea to Israel to a remote medical testing facility in Wales, and finally to a refugee camp in the one place savvy doomsday preppers have eyeballed since 1999 as the place to be in a crisis, Nova Scotia.


The real-life pair of Jolie and Pitt  got started on their global betterment tour when Jolie starred in Beyond Borders. As if continuing that film's message, Brad plays a selfless UN worker who has survived some of the most harrowing places on Earth, so the disasters of this zombie plague don't stress him out the way they do other dads. He has a strong, supportive wife, two glowing children, and great fun family rapport. Over the course of the movie these kids (they adopt another kid whose soon-dead family they bond with while hiding for the night in a NJ tenement), and wife are never really in danger, or at any rate, they don't panic because they trust in their heavenly-faced father. We sense that even when the zombie spittle is flying fast and furious no harm will come to them. In fact those who stay super close to Pitt miraculously survive even as everyone else around them are infected and/or dead. The concern is solely as to where and how Pitt's UN semi-unfazable superdad will solve the zombie problem,


Pitt avoids the issues that plagued the earlier dads of great adventure exceedingly well, regularly making eye contact with people being bitten and devoured but then not helping them or stopping to save them. There's something reassuring about how being a representative from the UN gets you driven all around the world without need for check-in or bag search. Telling moments reveal a savvy about the proximal responsibility issue: the grateful singing of the Palestinians being let into Israel to avoid the plague excites the zombies and drives them over the impregnable wall; The one moment of true Brad danger comes when his wife's phone call rings as he's trying to sneak around sleeping zombies. This is a movie that knows how any glimmer of empathy, proximal responsibility, etc. can set off a chain reaction. Only Brad's compassionate but survival-based mojo manages to know when to cut and run in true triage fashion.


Fury (2014) finds Pitt not saving the world while mom and foundlings wait at a Nova Scotia refugee camp with slippers and pipe, but blasting the hell out of the German homeland defenses with a motley tank crew of uncouth but loyal brigands. A clean-shaven newbie from the typing pool who quivers and quakes and resents Pitt forcing him to shoot an unarmed German prisoner just to show he's O.G. (as he earlier didn't fire on a soldier kids he saw, leading to another Sgt. being killed). We're put inside the mind of this kid (Logan Lerman) and there's some of that distasteful anachronism where he's way too wussy for 1945, hell, even for 1975, but wussy like they only started to make 'em in the post-PC 'declawing' of masculinity beginning around the early 80s. Wardaddy does the right thing in forcing him to kill an unarmed soldier, it's a matter of Pitt and crew's on personal survival the kid give up his squeamish morality and suggesting all sensitive typists (like myself) could use a few months on the front lines of a war with a guy like Wardaddy to toughen us up to the point we can turn compassion into an asset rather than a liability, that we don't hesitate on the trigger when its time to kill. 


We've seen this PC young typist character before, in Saving Private Ryan (played by the ever-mugging Jeremy Davies), though there we also had the chronic complainer (Ed Burns), and the "Wardaddy" there wasn't a mighty Pitt but 'decent guy' Tom Hanks. Pitt had proved he could be wild and liberated even whilst a young scrap of a fella, back in Thelma and Louise, so that's never been in doubt, but even so, here we got some extra layers of toughness as borne out by his scarred and diesel oil-stained face. We see him get kind of cleaned up when a nice little breakfast served up by Pitt and a couple of frauleinsis invaded by the rest of his motley tank corp, and we see Pitt forced into a weird no-win zone between solidarity with his rapey crew and an innate gentlemanly spirit. It's the most tiresome scene in the film, and I'll confess I FF-ed part of the way, but it's almost worth it for the brutal pay-off, which finally brings the sudden deathliness of things to bear for our milquetoast. Eventually the lad even learns when to let a kraut fry to death and when to chop him in half.  Hell yeah, Sgt. Rock loves this movie, wherever he is.


And if the whole last stand thing means that yet again the Saving Private similarities come too close to call, what is so important about Fury is what's not there, no balderdash bullshit about needing to ask a goddamned woman whether or not you 'earned it' and all that trying to find some greatest generation noble cause lollipop at the center of the severed head tootsie roll.

We all knew Pitt could bring the nihilistic badassitude as could Michael Pena (Observe and Report), the real surprises in the crew are Jon Bernthal as the unkempt creep whose iron john energy finally connects with Lerman after the fraulein incident and Shia LaBeouf, whom I've always regarded with some level of contempt, but completely changed my mind with his bible-quoting sonofabitch here. When it comes down to the nitty gritty of sharing last cigarettes and drinks before almost certain doom, it's Shia who really brought it home to me, deep in my socks, the feeling of being fully cognizant of the true finality of extinction, how one's death is pressed right up on the glass and always just a tap away, and of standing firm anyway, fully in thrall of the only thing that can transcend the overwhelming instinct towards self-preservation, devotion to one's team, the crew, the captain, the Pitt, the king. It's something that for all its' greatness the entirety of Band of Brothers was never able to achieve, and yet it's all right there, in Shia, who gets his voice down a full octave and takes swigs of booze so believably (as in, the pain of no chaser, rather than the blokes who drink it like ice tea) that you can smell the fumes inside that tank, adding to the pungent manly aroma of dried blood, sweat, gun powder, diesel oil, and cigarettes.


There's no voiceover in Fury, either, which also sets it above so many of its 'mother, am I a good man?' counterparts. And yhe ending credits are some of the coolest I've seen, with Steven Price's great A Silver Mt. Zion-esque soundtrack blasting over high contrast color-res images of the rest of the war, the idea that we all think that by the time we rolled over the German border the war was already won, but there was still a whole lot of pointless killing and destruction left undone. What I mean is that in Fury war is hell, and in 1945 was mostly over anyway, so the dirty jobs left for doing were somehow double heinous, a pure waste of property, architecture, and lives rather than a noble cause. The war's all over but the signatures, half the soldiers they're fighting are old men and kids, therefore the continued bloodbath has no more meaning or political importance, it's not preserving democracy anymore, it's just slaughter, which makes the relationships of the tank crew that much more important.

Ask the guys in Afghanistan and Iraq what they're fighting for and the answer's always the same: the guy next to them in the foxhole, their buddy, their brother by fire. That's the kind of thing that would sound trite in a voiceover but if a movie like Fury can show rather than tell, then maybe the senselessness itself can make sense. War is hell right up to the end and so is life when the stuff's stripped away. More so in Fury than most war films (since maybe the 1930s) if you're going to survive, you need to become Hell's chosen badass. So here we finally learn what Spielberg only hinted at in his clutching for decency, that every milquetoast has it in him to face death with both barrels blazing if it comes to that, and to let go of burdensome humanity and at the same time find a whole new Nietzschean paradigm. Patton knew it. Kubrick knew it. Pitt's "Wardaddy" knows it and director David Ayers knows it. Scuttlebutt is he had the boys play in a real life morning fight club, to toughen up their faces and get them hardened, amped but low key, weary but jacked, cool but not cold, the way we all wanted to be after Fight Club. Coincidence? No such thing. In filmmaking as in war, the comfort of phony personae is the first thing that must go and the fastest way to shuck it is in a bare knuckle brawl. Whether as Sgt. Wardaddy or Sgt. Aldo Raine, Tyler Durden or Gerry Lane, it's the Pitt persona who's never wavered from that punchy code. He is our tousled lord and king, he is our approximate Arthur, our Kalifornia king. He is Hollywood's ice cream face emperor Joe Black, and all that's standing between us and the terrible apron string hydra called mother.