FIGHT CLUB Directed by David Fincher
"The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club," says ringmaster Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), addressing a group of eager young men who've assembled in the basement of a seedy bar to beat each other senseless. "The second rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club."
Ah, but rules were made to be broken, and it's a safe bet everyone who sees director David Fincher's brutal, stylistically brilliant "Fight Club" will have something to say about it. Given the current climate of political correctness, most of those comments will be negative, denouncing the movie for glamorizing violence and terrorism or shaming the script's anti-everything stance.
Those with long memories will recall there was once another picture which earned the same kinds of criticisms when it was first released: Stanley Kubrick's 1971 masterpiece "A Clockwork Orange." If "Orange" was a bitter answer to the "all you need is love" message of the late 1960s, "Club" is a brass-knuckled slap in the face to yuppiedom and its "greed is good" mantra.
Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel was compared in some critical quarters to J.G. Ballard's "Crash" in its depiction of outsiders brought together by shared passions for pain. But Ballard's characters were cryptic and mostly voyeuristic, while "Fight Club" is made up of everyday people, the same kinds of educated, mildly successful guys you'd find in any office building or apartment complex.
One of them is our nameless narrator (Edward Norton), a recall coordinator for a major car company. He's a drab, joyless, constantly exhausted drone who finds his only fulfillment in life comes from crashing support group meetings, such as those for victims of testicular cancer or "incest survivors."
When he crosses pathes first with chain-smoking "tourist" Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) and then with the mysterious soap salesman Tyler Durden, our hero begins to rethink his entire life and to wonder why he's let himself be defined by the IKEA and Crate and Barrel furnishings decorating his condo. "The things you own end up owning you," Tyler tells him.
Fight Club, the new outlet for the narrator's built-up hostility, is an exclusive society in which the members pummel each other with their bare fists; black eyes, shattered jaws and broken teeth are this club's equivalent of the secret handshake. But what begins as a bloody good time eventually mutates into something bigger and more dangerous as Fight Club organizer Tyler becomes increasingly messianic and starts giving out "homework assignments" to his devotees.
"We have no Great War, no Great Depression," insists Tyler. "Our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives." The sermonette resounds with the Fight Club followers, and it's likely to ring a familiar bell with many of the twenty- and thirtysomethings in the audience. The movie is quite astute in recognizing and capitalizing on the resentment felt by a large portion of our blue-collar and white-collar workforce, the people who live paycheck to paycheck and badly want to believe that a new car or a larger wardrobe will magically change their circumstances.
Even if you can't accept its message, "Fight Club" may still draw you in through Fincher's spellbinding scene compositions and clever use of digital animation and extreme close-ups. Like all his work, the film is dark and moody -- the actors are almost always seen in half-light or shadows or varying shades of black -- but at the same time there's a feverish urgency in the storytelling. Although the movie is almost two and a half hours long, it seems to whiz past your eyes like a graffiti-covered subway train.
After seriously damaging his credibility with wooden performances in "The Devil's Own," "Seven Years in Tibet" and the sleep-inducing "Meet Joe Black," Pitt rebounds spectacularly here, turning Tyler into a hustler who's equal parts smarm and charm. Carter, speaking in a brittle accent reminiscent of Judy Davis, is engagingly batty; listen for the song she sings on her way out of Tyler's dilapidated house.
Norton, however, is flat-out amazing in the kind of part most actors would dismiss as being unplayable. He's required to be the movie's moral center, as well as milk humor out of bizarre situations (such as a soon-to-be classic moment in his boss' office) and undergo a near-complete personality transformation in the course of the action. Norton does it all, and much more, subtly conveying his attraction to Tyler and his disillusionment with what he sees as the perversion of his dream.
That's important because anyone who pays attention will see the movie is not an endorsement of anarchy, but a warning about what can happen in a world full of confused, angry men without any positive role models to follow. Yet Fincher's film will probably be condemned by many of the same moviegoers who turned mindless schlock like "Double Jeopardy" (in which we're asked to root for Ashley Judd's character to track down and kill her husband) and "The General's Daughter" (which turns a rape victim into a dominatrix before giving us a lengthy depiction of her murder) into major box office hits. If it does nothing else, "Fight Club" should serve to point out the hypocracy of the general public, which begs for gun control and stricter enforcement of movie ratings one moment and drops its kids off at the video store to pick up "The Matrix" the next. James Sanford
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