My friend the movie producer is a major fan of Mad Max: Fury Road. He says it’s the best film he thinks he’s seen in five years. This is interesting, because it’s not the kind of movie he makes; he produces “indies,” meaning films with relatively modest budgets that center on character rather than spectacle. By contrast, Mad Max: Fury Road cost $150 million, has very little dialogue, and has a story you have to piece together in your head because the film itself makes almost no effort to piece it together for you.
My friend the movie producer thinks this is beside the point and that my review of the movie (“Max Redux,” May 25) did not do it justice. I had said it was basically one long chase scene, but that “it’s an amazing chase scene, and it’s even more amazing that the freakish energy of this blockbuster emanates from George Miller, who is now 70 and (one would have thought) too old for this sort of thing. In its scale, invention, and power, Mad Max: Fury Road puts all other action pictures in memory to shame.” That was pretty favorable, but not favorable enough for my friend. He believes Mad Max: Fury Road is a breakthrough in the use of film as sheer visual art, and so he asked me to come over to his place to watch it with him on his own projected movie screen with full Dolby sound and reconsider my judgment.
I said sure because, really, how cool is that?
I was also interested to see it again because the movie has grown in stature since its release, when it received wildly favorable reviews but proved only a middling performer at the box office. Nonetheless, it received 10 Oscar nominations, an unprecedented number for an action picture. Those nominations included one for best picture and one for George Miller’s directing.
So here’s my report after the second viewing: To my surprise, I think my friend the movie producer is on to something. I did underrate Mad Max: Fury Road. It is more than an amazing chase movie. I had a sense of this in my initial review when I said its opening scenes “offer a genuinely startling vision of hell on earth.” On second viewing, though, I saw that the whole movie is nothing less than a painterly vision of what a 21st-century hell on earth would look like: a world in which humans have gone feral and have come to be ruled by the sickest among them, men riven with radiation disease owing to a thermonuclear war.
My friend the movie producer compared the visual force of Mad Max: Fury Road to a Jackson Pollock; but I think, as a whole, what Miller has achieved here is a motion-picture analogue to one specific work of visual art. It is Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death. That 1562 work may be the most hyperactive painting in the Western canon and among the most violent—one in which the sheer accretion of visual detail about the ways in which people can kill and be killed was entirely without precedent. It remains so ghoulish in its imaginative detail one can only wonder at the psychic torments that surely afflicted Bruegel as he realized it.
That is not true of Miller, to be sure, because he had the example of Bruegel (and Bruegel’s near-contemporary Hieronymus Bosch) to work from and because images of human carnage and pestilence—both real and created for other works of pulp fiction—are as commonplace now as they were unimaginable in Bruegel’s day.
Unlike Bruegel, Miller wasn’t summoning up these harrowing images from his own brain. But they are the work, he has said, of 30 years of thinking about how to make a fourth film in his Mad Max series. The multiplicity and variety of them are staggering. And there really is a kind of painterly artistry at work in Mad Max: Fury Road that I’m not sure anyone before George Miller has achieved on film.
It’s perhaps a strange word to use, “painterly.” A painting captures and freezes a moment in time and only suggests action and motion—or in the case of The Triumph of Death, a series of frozen moments placed in proximity to each other across the panel, all of which work together to suggest the hopelessness of human existence. Mad Max is all action and motion, with only a few moments at which the camera or the people or the vehicles in which they are riding (and from which they often fly off) are at rest. For most of the movie’s running time, Miller places these bodies and vehicles in a nearly abstract landscape of red desert and rocks—the “fury road”—and the interaction of the landscape with the people and the metal creates an ever-changing series of tableaux.
Just as paintings are formal compositions that reveal their meaning through the use of space and emphasis on the canvas—where things are in relation to one another, where the use of light effects and brushstrokes is intended to pull the viewer’s gaze—so every frame of Mad Max: Fury Road seems consciously composed with a painter’s interest in directing the eye. And as my friend the producer pointed out, and knows better than I or anyone else who only watches films rather than makes them, Miller deploys every possible version of what might be called a moviemaker’s “brushstroke”; he speeds up the film, he slows it down, he enhances its color, he drains its color, he takes advantage of the landscape, he “digitizes” the landscape. And at times he combines these and other techniques in a seamless whole.
That is why my friend the producer said the plot and the dialogue and the acting are not at issue here—that Mad Max: Fury Road does things visually that have never been done before. And—this is the key thing—will never be done again, because these are images that belong to George Miller. Credit must be due to John Searle, the extraordinary cinematographer responsible for capturing them, but he was serving Miller’s own Bruegel-like vision at 24 frames a second.
If Miller does not win the Oscar next month, it will be a crime. But it should be a crime for which Miller is prepared since, as Max says in one of the movie’s few memorable lines, “Hope is a mistake.”
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
