Film Review: The Brutal Melodrama of "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga"

George Miller's newest entry in the long-running "Mad Max" franchise is an exhilarating, beautiful, and violent morality tale of one woman's suffering and quest for vengeance.

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Readers of this newsletter know that I have a longstanding interest in melodrama in all of its forms, whether as a genre, a style, or a sensibility. There’s just something about the way that melodrama incites feeling–whether through the temporal structures of too late/in the nick of time or its emphasis on suffering hero(ine)s–that calls to the sensitive soul in me. Ever since graduate school I’ve been attuned to and appreciative of melodrama in all of its guises, whether in the form of a woman’s film (also known as weepie) or male action films. If there’s a lot of feelings involved, I’m going to be there for it. 

Which brings us to Furiosa. 

At first blush it might seem a bit counterintuitive to say that a film like this one, laden with action and propulsively kinetic pleasures as it is, could be seen as anything even remotely melodramatic. Yet melodrama has always been key to the Mad Max saga, from the very beginning when Max loses his family, setting him on the path he will pursue for the rest of the original trilogy. It’s also there in Fury Road, particularly in Furiosa’s thwarted desire to return to the Green Place of her youth, which has now been reduced to nothing more than a bleak swamp. Indeed, this yearning for a space of innocence that can never be regained is at the heart of Furiosa. 

When the film begins, a young Furiosa (Alyla Browne as a girl and Anya Taylor-Joy as an adult) is out gathering fruit with her companion in the Green Place of Many Mothers. The Edenic imagery is impossible to miss, even as it is also marred by the presence of several raiders, who kidnap Furiosa and take her to the deranged warlord known as Dementus (a campy but still menacing Chris Hemsworth), who later kills her mother and keeps her prisoner. Furiosa is eventually traded to Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), and she gradually becomes a key part of his army, though she never lets go of the hope that she might one day be able to return to the Green Place.

As this summary makes clear, the narrative structure of Furiosa revolves around the title character’s two primary yearnings: to avenge her mother’s death by killing Dementus and to return to the idyllic space of innocence that was stolen from her. Everything she does is in service of these two goals, whether it’s helping the mechanics of the Citadel construct a war rig or keeping a seed given to her mother in the hopes that she can one day plant it in the vanished Eden of her youth. Time and again, however, Furiosa–like any good melodramatic hero–must suffer, whether it’s by losing her arm (which, it’s worth pointing out, contained a map that would have guided her back to the Green Place) or her soulmate, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), who suffers an ignominious death at Dementus’ hands. She is constantly caught up in the contradiction of having agency and being powerless, yearning for something she can never quite attain.

The final confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus brings the film’s melodramatic ethos into particularly sharp focus. Having finally cornered the man whose minions stole her from her idyllic existence and brutally executed her mother, Furiosa at last has the chance to put the restless spirit of vengeance to bed. Yet, because Furiosa is motivated by a melodramatic impulse, it forces both Furiosa and those of us sitting in the audience to acknowledge that there is no regaining that which has been lost. Thus, for all that she manages to inflict pain on her erstwhile tormenter, there is, as Dementus himself says, no hope that she’ll ever regain what he took from her. In the language of melodrama, it is always/already too late for Furiosa, who can do nothing more than punish her former tormentor in the hope that doing so will give her at least some measure of peace. 

It’s here, though, that the film plays a little fast and loose with narrative coherence, for the History Man–who acts as a sort of adviser to Dementus and a quasi-parent for Furiosa–tells the audience that his charge didn’t shoot Dementus or drag him behind her but, instead, turned him into living fertilizer for the seed given to her by her mother. If true, this is a fitting punishment for this film’s histrionically melodramatic villain, who has done so much to wreak havoc both on Furiosa and on everyone else with whom he has come into contact. Sentenced to a purgatorial existence, it's’ too late for him to ever achieve the glory and the grandeur he has so long sought.

At a broader level, of course, it’s also too late for the entire world in which this story takes place. Humanity has almost destroyed itself, leaving behind a landscape of monsters and armed redoubts, where only the ruthless survive. In such a system, there can only be small victories, and indeed Furiosa ends on a somewhat optimistic note, as the stage has been set for the title character’s famous effort to save Immortan Joe’s wives from the sexual slavery in which they have so long been held.

Furiosa is, in my mind, the perfect blending of Hobbesian worldview and melodramatic sensibility, and it anchors all of this in an aesthetic that is like nothing else I’ve recently seen. It’s beautiful and brutal and exhilarating, a film that relies on feelings just as much as it does on narrative logic. Moreover, it has, as many others have pointed out, the heightened power of myth, particularly since the narrative itself is filtered through the (possibly unreliable) point of view of the History Man. It ultimately doesn’t quite matter whether the story we’ve just seen is true or not. Instead, what matters is that it feels true at an emotional and affective level. There is, then, a bleak sort of morality to Furiosa’s journey from innocence to vengeance and to warrior for justice. In the end, as so often in melodrama, there is good in this world, and it takes a woman like Furiosa to see it brought to fruition.