#Into the fray the grey movie#

You might be asking yourself, how can poetry compete with this tour-de-force and with all the resources that film has at its disposal? Well, we here at P&PC think that maybe that's the wrong question to be asking. Then Ottway leaps forward toward the viewer, and the camera goes black. We hear a growl that may come from him or from the wolves. We see him next as a boy sitting on his father's lap. When the camera takes us away from Ottway's father's den and back to the wolf den, we see Ottway still mouthing the words to the poem. With the poem newly readable, Ottway repeats it a final time: Rather, in becoming a metaphor for his life, which has slowly come into focus over the course of the film, the poem is blurry at first and is brought into focus and made readable by the camera, letting the audience experience in miniature Ottway's journey toward clarity. But what's remarkable about this scene is that we don't see the typewritten poem clearly at first. Then, as you can see for yourself in the backwards video clip below, the camera shows us the poem.

(You get get it, don't you? Wolf den=dad's den?) He says, 'Once more into the fray.' Thus armed for his final stand, he flashes back again to his dad's den where the poem hangs on the wall. Then he tapes a dagger to one hand, breaks a bunch of airplane liquor bottles against a rock so that they become weapons, and tapes them to his other hand. He flashes back to the woman we saw him thinking about and writing to in the film's opening montage, and we realize now, for the first time, that she she didn't leave him but died, perhaps of cancer. Surrounded by bones, standing in the falling snow, and ringed by the wolf pack, he kneels down, makes a pile of all the wallets that he's been collecting from everyone who's died, and adds his own to the stack.

Ottway is the only one left alive, and he's somehow managed to stumble into the wolves' den, metaphor that it is for all of his unresolved issues. So, by the last scene of the movie, then, we've heard the poem twice, and we've seen it-or at least the paper it's written on-several other times as Ottway has stored the letter in which it's written in his wallet and saved it from the plane's burning wreckage. Ottway concludes, 'Storm clouds.' And the men turn their attention back to the present. I read it at his funeral: 'Once more into the fray / Into the last good fight I'll ever know / Live and die on this day / Live and die on this day.'ДЄ clap of thunder sounds. It was only when I was a lot older did I realize that he'd written it. There was one that hung over his desk in the den. But a clichГ©d Irish motherfucker when he wanted to be-drinker, brawler, all that stuff. Ottway, by this point established as the group's Alpha, tells part of his story and, in an extended scene, flashes back to his childhood.

There, around a campfire, as the wolves surround them in the darkness, and as one of their group is hallucinating in the process of dying from hypoxia, the men start sharing their stories-about sex, faith, family, and whatever source of inspiration keeps them fighting. What we don't know at the beginning of the movie- that he's remem- bering a poem, that his father wrote it, that it hung above his father's desk in the den-gets cleared up partway through the film, after the plane crash, after lots of competition for the Alpha position among the crash survivors, and after the men seek shelter in the woods. Ottway pauses, then adds the poem's first two lines, 'Once more into the fray-into the last good fight I'll ever know.' The camera shows Ottway putting a rifle muzzle into his mouth, and then we hear the poem's final lines, 'Live and die on this day. Poison вЂ¦ And IвЂ™ve stopped doing this world any real good.,' he writes. I know I canвЂ™t get you back вЂ¦ I donвЂ™t know why this has happened to us.

And I canвЂ™t get you back вЂ¦ I donвЂ™t know why IвЂ™m writing this. In fact, the clash of discursive registers between it and what he's thinking is a little confusing: 'I want to see your face, feel your hands in mine, feel you against me. At this point, though, we don't even know it's a poem. Indeed, at the beginning of the film-during a heavy-handed montage that shows Ottway killing wolves, lying in bed with his wife whom we eventually learn has died, writing a final letter to her about how miserable his life has become, flashing back to what we eventually learn is his childhood, and making preparations to commit suicide-the poem's words run through his head as part of a voice-over, presumably a section of what he's writing in his final letter.

#Into the fray the grey movie#

Jane and The Expend- ables one better, though, as the poem (pictured here) doesn't just end the movie but provides the frame mechanism for the entire narrative itself (it's even quoted on the movie poster).