Writing about movies can be a wondrous adventure, especially when your research uncovers that George Miller, the seventy-year-old director of Mad Max: Fury Road, wrote and produced Babe. The children’s movie about a talking piglet? Yea, this Babe. Miller even came back and directed the sequel, Babe: Pig in the City. After an extended break, Miller then directed the underappreciated animated penguin films Happy Feet and Happy Feet 2. So prior to Fury Road, Miller directed three children’s movies. What does this all mean?
I’m not bringing this up to mock Miller; actually, it’s quite the opposite. Rarely is a director’s portfolio this diverse or strangely eclectic. It takes a tremendously adept artist to so casually switch between apocalyptic psychopaths and anthropomorphic furballs, one who is supremely in touch with and interested about the humanity within each and every story. Miller’s breadth of cinematic experimentation and proficiency surprised me; and in retrospect, that only made me appreciate Fury Road even more.
The plot of Fury Road sounds like it was written on the back of a cocktail napkin: in an apocalyptic future, a rogue warrior steals a harem of the big, bad boss’ wives and embarks on a gasoline-and-blood-fueled race to grant them safety. The twist to this story is that this warrior, the driver of both the plot and the film’s incredulously engineered semi-truck war rig, is not actually the eponymous Max, but a woman. Her name is Imperator Furiosa, which I thought was the coolest name ever for a character until I browsed through IMDB and noticed these other characters’ names: Rictus Erectus, Toast the Knowing, The Splendid Angharad, Cheedo the Fragile, The People Eater, The Bullet Farmer, The Doof Warrior.
I mean, come on. The Doof Warrior is a man in a red jumpsuit who plays a double-neck guitar while suspended in front of a hundred speakers. Naturally, the guitar is also a flamethrower.
But I digress.
Fury Road is great, loud, eye-popping, blood-pumping fun. It’s a prime example of style over substance, which isn’t necessarily to say this movie doesn’t have anything to say about the greater patina of human culture. Actually, it’s more a reflection of just how astronomically stylish this movie really is. A few weeks ago, I pointed out that Age of Ultron was yet another example of a forgettable CGI blockbuster with no stakes. I was wrong. Its conundrum is actually more complex than that -- the stakes in Age of Ultron are simultaneously incomprehensibly high (the entire galaxy could be destroyed) and reservedly low (no one involved will even break a sweat). There is an incalculable amount of destruction, yet very few deaths (something Whedon painstakingly hammered home). Faces contort in anger, shock, and terror, yet the lives of everyone in the movie never actually feels threatened. The climax consists of nothing more than stunt doubles miming punches with 8,000 CGI artists. This isn’t dramatic storytelling. This is Teflon Moviemaking -- all of the motions, none of the mess.
Fury Road is anything but easy. It doesn’t simply portray, it sweats. And it hurts. And it wants us to feel its every grain of sand and drop of blood. It’s a bold throwback to old-school practical effects, moviemaking that uses CGI as a tool for enhancements rather than a crutch for storytelling. In the landscape of the current blockbuster arena, one in which destroying a city, a planet, a universe merely requires a few keystrokes, filmmakers seem to be losing touch with the inimitable presence of real human stakes.
We as an audience are supremely keen on details, especially ones involving people. We have an innate ability to quickly identify falsities or inconsistencies in both human behavior and human appearance. Moreover, we have an exceptional capacity for sympathy and projection -- what we see or hear or touch has the potential to conjure the strongest of emotional responses. This is what ran through my mind as I watched scene after scene, chase after chase of Fury Road with a kind of overwhelmed fascination. Technically, it all looked and sounded so great, shot and directed and edited with a vigor that can only come from real, physical preparation and execution. It looked hard and dangerous and exciting. It was fun.
But what makes Fury Road resonate more than the Marvels or Transformers of the world is its inherent interest in the human condition. Miller has stated the film is about the uneven distribution of wealth and “the patriarchy controlling all the resources.” While this quote makes for a neat soundbite, it oversimplifies the visual artistry involved to arrive at this theme. In between the breath-taking visages of lightning sandstorms and deserted wastelands, Miller inserts inconspicuous moments of visual grace -- the severing of a spike-lined chastity belt; the nurturing glow of yellow light on a deceased newborn amid a sea of black; the literal washing away of blood on Max’s hands with mothers’ milk -- that punctuate the apocalyptic wasteland with reminders of the humanity behind the wanton destruction. These are the frames of Fury Road, crafted with such pointed intention and visual dexterity, that remind me of why I go to the movies.
