FIGHT CLUB *** (out of four) -a review by Bill Chambers (fight@filmfreakcentral.net)
(Shampoo + Conditioner in one website! Film Freak Central - http://filmfreakcentral.net ....DVD reviews, contests, and more)
starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf screenplay by Jim Uhls, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk directed by David Fincher
Some movie rags have reported that Fight Club's release date was bumped from July to October to distance it from the Columbine shootings. If that's true (director David Fincher says he just needed more time to fine tune the editing), isn't Fox taking a step backward by attaching to all Fight Club prints the trailer for Light it Up, a film about a high school kid who tires of the dreaded "system" and therefore takes his classmates hostage? Fight Club is very violent, but Light it Up looks sensationalistic.
Fight Club explores instead of exploiting. It never stops presenting high-falutin' ideas. In some ways, the film is too existential to be incendiary-you don't feel riled up by the closing credits, you feel worn out, exhausted from playing headgames.
The story is told through the eyes of Norton's nameless narrator (the movie refers to him as Jack at times, so I will do the same here), a flunky for an unidentified automaker by day, an insomniac always. Jack spends entire evenings sifting through Ikea catalogues and staring hopelessly at TV infomercials. He tells his physician he's miserable, dying inside, but the doctor responds that if he really wants to know about pain, he should meet with victims of testicular cancer.
Jack actually visits a support group for such people, and their stories cause him to weep uncontrollably. At last, feelings. A good cry helps him sleep like a baby; soon, he becomes an eager tourist of like meetings, but Marla (Carter), another phony who has begun making the support group rounds for "free cake and coffee," interrupts his good time. Maybe her beauty distracts him, or maybe he just can't deal with his own lie reflected back, but Jack is made positively irate by Marla's presence on his turf.
He takes a break from the 12-step world for company trips, and on one plane ride he meets Tyler Durden (Pitt-has he ever been this magnetic?), a soap salesman with the gift of gab. They exchange business cards, and when Jack returns home to find his apartment bombed out (the stove's pilot light was left on), he calls Tyler. Three pitchers of beer later, Jack has a place to stay.
Tyler introduces him to a seedier life. In Jack's new digs, the electricity must be turned off during a rainstorm. The shower runs brown water. The staircase could collapse at any moment. But this is to his delight: for once, he's not slave to his stuff-expensive furnishings and appliances. (Tyler tells him, "We don't own things, the things own us.")
Tyler offers Jack another release through fighting. What starts out as a few innocuous swings at one another in a parking lot turns into an underground sensation, with various disillusioned men meeting one night of the week in the basement of a dive to scrap. (Tyler, in essence, extols the virtues of nihilism.) Marla disrupts Jack's happiness again, though, when she worms her way back into his life through a sexual relationship with Tyler.
After only three films (Alien3, Se7en, The Game), Fincher has developed a distinct style-there is a consistent tone running through his filmography which could be weakly characterized as "bleak". Certainly, his works are linked by visual motifs, such as the most piercing flashlights this side of Spielberg, dank locales, flash frames, and low angles. (His technique is a bit more playful this time around; his acknowledgment of the medium itself in one scene is downright postmodern.) Fight Club also recalls The Game in its second half as Jack's reality changes and he no longer knows who is trustworthy.
But Fincher's past examinations of identity crisis (consider also Se7en's villain) were emotionally hard-hitting, and while Fight Club should be applauded for going out on a philosophical limb (much is made of Jack and Tyler's yin yang dynamic, as symbolized by Jack's table, and how violence will turn you into a drone as much as sitting under the fluorescent lights in a cubicle might), it is unmoving. Cynicism gets in the way at the start, when we're asked to laugh at truly pitiable characters, including Meat Loaf's sympathetic cancer survivor (the camera keeps lingering on his large, feminine breasts). (Other jokes go over better.) When the narrative shifts gears to Marla's subplot, we learn that she's a burnout (hardly the femme fatale the ads would have you believe), and little else. She exists to inform us about Jack, so we vest little interest in their relationship.
By film's end, so many concepts and plot twists have been thrown our way that we're left dizzy at best. The final shot is a feast for the eyes and ears, but Fincher denies us what Jack wants and periodically achieves: catharsis. Fight Club is a darkly comic work of crazed genius (I'd call it cinematic pop art), but its punches aim for the head, not the heart.
-October, 1999
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews