FIGHT CLUB
Having only had a chance to
see it once, I'm finding it difficult to put together a coherent review
of FIGHT CLUB, the new film by David Fincher (Seven, The Game) with
Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. It so completely defied my every expectation
that the collision between my preconceptions and what was actually there
was catastrophic. I can only blubber like a semi-retarded dwarf:
"gol-dang, that there moving picture shore was sumthin'."
Norton, who's been a favorite
of mine ever since the classic American History X, stars as the
nameless "Narrator" of the film, which is based--for the most part, faithfully--on
the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. His character is an anonymous Gen-X
office drone who works as a recall coordinator for a major car manufacturer.
"Which car manufacturer?" asks a woman sitting next to him on a plane.
"A major car manufacturer," he reassures her. This generic-ness
is deliberate: many important characters go unnamed or misnamed, and the
city most of the film takes place in is, like the city in Seven,
completely unrecognizable. But like the city in Seven, the
environs play a crucial role in setting the tone--where every building
in Seven was weathered, rain-soaked, and Gothic, Fight Club's
burg is full of giant glass-and-steel towers, yuppified apartment complexes,
light, and motion. With a few plot-crucial exceptions, nothing looks
more than ten years old; it's a town without a past.
Norton, our hero, suffers from
severe insomnia. His job is wearing him thin and he's trying to find
solace in Ikea catalogs. (One memorable shot shows his empty apartment
gradually being filled with designer furniture, complete with catalog-style
photography and text descriptions.) His doctor flippantly advises
him to check out the testicular cancer survivors' support group--"now those
are some guys with real problems." Norton goes, and in short
order finds his head being clung to the overdeveloped chest of a sobbing,
massively overweight survivor named Bob (played by Meat Loaf, woohoo!).
Thanks to hormone therapy, Bob, the narrator notes, "had bitch tits."
Then Norton opens up about his own, totally fraudulent, pain. The
experience proves so cathartic that the narrator's insomnia is temporarily
cured. Addicted to the experience, he begins to attend more groups
(using a different name at each one)...which works fine, until he discovers
Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) another voyeur like himself. (He's clued
in by her appearance at the testicular cancer group...though, as she points
out, "I have more of a right to be here than you...you still have your
balls.") Knowing that there's another faker ruins it for him, and
his insomnia returns with a vengeance.
Then, one night on a plane,
he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), the charismatic owner and sole employee
of the Paper Street Soap Company. Tyler, who offers trenchant criticisms
of capitalism and corporate society, seems like a charming flake, until
the narrator gets home to find his apartment a blasted ruin. Needing
a place to stay, he calls Tyler, and the two of them begin to form a special
bond, culminating in a bloody fistfight outside a local bar. Exhilarated
by the atavistic thrill of hand-to-hand combat, the two men agree to meet
each week for another bout. Pretty soon other patrons start getting
in on the action; after a month, they found Fight Club, an organization
dedicated to liberating men from their day-to-day drudgery by allowing
them a chance to beat the snot out of one another.
As Fight Club grows, Tyler
becomes more and more messianic, organizing increasingly bold raids on
what he sees as the symbols of an oppressive modern existence: running
magnets over the tapes at Blockbuster, blowing up computers, and stealing
human fat from a liposuction clinic to make bars of soap to sell to classy
department stores. At first the newly liberated narrator follows
Tyler enthusiastically, but his doubts increase as Fight Club expands exponentially,
becoming a nationwide underground movement trying to undermine every aspect
of society. New inductees are stripped of their identities and given
shaved heads, black muscle shirts, and jackboots. The fascistic overtones
of this revolution, and his mounting jealousy of Tyler's marathon sex bouts
with Marla, pushes Norton's character further and further to the periphery
of his own creation, until he decides he wants to cut Tyler back down to
size.
FIGHT CLUB has a new and unique
energy to it, galvanized by Fincher's crack-fueled photography and the
asskicking music of the Dust Brothers. But what I really loved about
this movie is the way it turns the tables on the Tyler Durdens and Gen-X
whiners of this world. While being brutally honest, and funny, about
the bleak realities of corporate life, this criticism is balmy and mild
compared to the savaging the movie gives to self-appointed malcontents.
Instead of liberating its members, the Fight Club simply offers a different
kind of slavery, one that doesn't end with the five o'clock bell -- "conformity
in nonconformity." Tyler repeats the common complaint that his age
group didn't have a Depression, a World War II, or a Vietnam to unite them
-- but we are made to see just how idiotic this complaint is, that it is
not crass materialism to not want to have to eat gruel and be shipped
off to die in a foreign land. But this message is still delivered
with wonderful, wonderful humor. FIGHT CLUB is the best comedy of
the year.
Though every performance here
is very good, people should take special note of Edward Norton. Any
one of his facial expressions--the half-smile, the ironic raised eyebrow--conveys
more than any ten lines of dialogue could. Hold me to this--if he
doesn't get nominated for an Oscar, I'm going to give myself a black eye.
(And if any of you give away the ending to anyone, I'll probably want to
give you one for good measure.)
Fight Club
THE GOOD: Everything.
THE BAD: People are going to think this is an
action movie, and it's going to piss them off. It's a comedy, dammit!
BOTTOM LINE: I'm going to see it at least five
times while it's still in theaters, and it wouldn't hurt you to follow
my example.
MY RATING: 96