Weepies don’t always look like The Notebook . David Ayer’s impressive WWII drama is a brutal battle epic with a teary emotional core.
Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal in Fury.
CTMG/Sony Pictures Entertainment
The first job given to Norman Ellison, the fresh-faced new Army recruit played by Logan Lerman in the World War II drama Fury, is to clean the remains of his predecessor out of the tank to which he's been assigned. The body's already been carted away, but there's splattered viscera against one of the walls to be mopped up, blood to be wiped away. And then, horribly, Ellison finds an unmistakable chunk of the dead guy's face, a sight that causes him to clamber outside and throw up in front of his indifferent colleagues.
Fury, which is written and directed by David Ayer (End of Watch, Sabotage) and opens in theaters on Oct. 17, is peppered with merciless moments like that. Like Saving Private Ryan, it's a World War II movie filled with urgency to get out from under the prettier images of heroism and valor conjured by the idea of American troops in that conflict. It's set in a ravaged 1945 Germany that frequently looks like it might be hell, and the conflict it portrays is all about flesh, from the soldier who, covered in flames, shoots himself to end his pain to the smashed remnants of a corpse in the mud that the tanks roll all over like roadkill. It's a war-in-hell story about the four veterans and one newcomer manning a Sherman tank called "Fury," but it's also about the depths of the relationships they've built with one another in the midst of combat. And in that way, it's also another type of movie — the kind I've always thought of as "the male weepie."
Weepies, as in movies that are intended to make you cry, needn't be gendered. But they tend to be thought of as being for women — like Terms of Endearment, Titantic, The Notebook, The Fault In Our Stars, films that created instant sisterhoods of shared Kleenex packets in the dark of theaters around the world. Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr's An Affair to Remember, one of the grand dames of the genre, was part of a running bit in Sleepless in Seattle — no female character could describe the plot without sobbing, but for the men, it was talking about war epic The Dirty Dozen that got the tears flowing.
Giles Keyte, CTMG/Sony Pictures Entertainment
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