It is an unconventional mainstream film, whose aim is to target a perpetually youth-oriented audience (anyone from aged 17 to 50) who want to identify with a film that is rebellious against society and their institutions. It succeeds mostly in being a visceral experience and for those who like to see Brad Pitt' pecs and how Edward Norton squirms when beaten up, and be bemused to hear Helena Bonham Carter complain that the boys sure love their violence more than they do sex.
The film eventually knocks itself out from hitting itself so much in the "old" noggin without really damaging its unspecified opponent-- society as a whole. The sheer nonsense of its storyline causes that knockout by relying on a ridiculous metaphor to make its point, too much glitter, and Pitt' and Norton' overacting; what results is a jarring experience, enough to make you think without thinking that being sado-masochistic is the way to achieve respect (it doesn't matter if this is meant to be a parody reflecting the violence in America: the violence is the thing in this story that the audience will remember most about this film). It succeeds in this venture only as a disturbing film, which makes the provocative assertion that those who are self-absorbed and mindless and go over-the-edge by doing violent acts are supposedly looking for hidden meanings in their life, which are given to them by false prophets, something that is happening currently in America to a great extent. But this film is too stilted, unconvincing, and inane to be the messenger delivering a warning about such dangers in society.
But if its comedy that it is after, then it has some success in meeting those expectations, as the stars were able to project themselves into this story with enough animation to give the film a titillating lift.
The film features a listless narrator named Jack (Edward Norton) to tell its story. He calls himself many names but no one in the film calls him by his right name, which is supposed to indicate that he is a symbol for the anonymous worker in contemporary America. He is a rather inconspicuous type, a further symbol of the modern man caught in the rat-race of the high tech world, who will tell us his loser's story of how as an unmarried 30-year-old, he feels unsatisfied with himself and with the way his life is going. We first see him in the opening scene being forced to flash back on his life, as the film's other protagonist in this nightmarish farce, the specter-like Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), has him tied to a chair and with a gun pointed inside his mouth, and is asking him to tell him what he is thinking about before he dies.
His story unfolds via flashbacks from his tied up position, as he tries to piece together what happened to him after he met Tyler and the film goes on for a dreary 139 minutes of non cinematic narration intermixed with an orgy of visual innovativeness.
He meets the nefarious Tyler on an airplane and comes to live with him in the toxic part of town where he resides, as he is invited into the squatter's dilapidated vacant house when returning from his airplane flight and discovering that his condo was blown up.
The more we get to know about the engaging soap salesman who is selling not only soap but a nihilistic philosophy, the more we learn how depraved he is. We are told that he makes his product from discarded liposuctioned human fat which he steals from the waste removal garbage cans and then sells them to boutiques who sell the product for $20 a bar; he also works part-time as a movie projectionists, splicing in penises into the children's film Cinderella that is currently showing; and, he also works part-time as a waiter in a ritzy hotel, where he urinates in the soup (now isn't that a pisser!).
While the Narrator is shown to be an uptight yuppie, living for material comfort, in particular, collecting expensive Scandinavian furniture to assuage his empty soul and define himself as a person. He works at a well-compensated but corrupt job for a big car manufacturer, as the representative for the company who goes out to investigate car crashes where the manufacturer he represents is being sued and it is his job to decide if it is cheaper to recall the malfunctioning parts that caused the accident or to fight the suit filed against the manufacturer. Human lives are not part of this equation.
Evidently, as we get to know these two opposites, we determine that they are perfectly suited for each other. A homo-erotic edge to their relationship is also hinted at, but like everything in this film, it is only superficially covered.
The Narrator suffers from insomnia, probably caused by his non-meaningful life. Upon an inadvertent remark made by his physician, who refuses to prescribe sleeping pills or pain killers for him, but tells him if you want to see real pain see how the men in the support group who have testicular cancer feel. The Narrator takes the doctor up on that idle suggestion and finds comfort there by crying on the shoulders of one of the men he is paired with, Big Bob Paulsen (Meatloaf). Finding it therapeutic to listen to someone else talk about their real pain and seeing that it will actually allow him to sleep like a baby, he therefore becomes a support group junkie, joining a wide variety of these self-help groups under false pretenses. It is here that he meets another phony, who also goes to these groups even though she doesn't have the disease the group calls for, the street-wise, emotionally bankrupt Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), who is addicted to attending meetings. She is a tourist, like him, going through life without finding herself. But she spoils his game as a faker, as he wants to be the only fake there and to be the one who is nurtured by the real pain of others.
The heart of the story takes place when the budding friendship between the two diverse misfits develops. The utterly depraved Tyler, exhibiting the ability to be a leader, with a need to offer sanctimonious maxims against the emptiness of materialism, such as, "You are not your job," and the irresolute Narrator, who is someone crying out for help and who is also someone ripe for being brainwashed.
Their relationship blossoms on their first night out when drinking together, and violence becomes the prerequisite for continuing it, as they take turns beating each other up, and with this added expression of meaning to their life bringing great satisfaction to them, they decide to open up what they call a Fight Club in the cellar of a bar, allowing other disgruntled types to voice their need for violence in their lives and to give them a sense of what real pain is. There's a series of rules, including the cleverly stated rule number 1 and 2, no one talks about the club. That all this is supposed to be funny is a matter of taste, though I think it is funny in a juvenile sort of way, where bad taste rules the day. The humor is catered to those who like their laughs coming to them shock treatment style. Their alienation from society, supposedly, relates to those in the audience who also feel powerless about all the violence taking place in the country and now will have been amply warned by the filmmaker not to follow charismatic leaders and join cults that offer easy solutions to their problems, which should give the film a conventional reason for being made.
The problem with the film's message, is that it comes via a film that is relying on the excesses of violence to put over its exploitive story, and then, to have this filmmaker be the voice of reason, is almost enough to make the average citizen who is concerned about the recent shootings in America's schools and the other sensational newsworthy violent acts, wonder what to make of this film, or to just barf at this outlandishly childish attempt to answer some very serious problems in such a mindlessly simple way. The fatuous simplicity the film offers for linking America's penchant for violence and sex, with the peoples' lack of fulfillment from meaningful jobs, is too much of a generality to be taken seriously. This response to what has gone wrong with the American dream is just as banal and wrong-headed a response, as those who would blame films such as this one for America's problems.
At some point in the film, probably as soon as the Fight Club was started by Tyler teaching the nerd how to fight and the club was then expanded into franchises across the country and evolved into a secret society of Mayhem, the film stopped being smart and turned into a pointless nonsensical venture, that is not serious enough to take seriously, except it should be complimented for its imaginative visual style and kinetic energy it shows.
The film's undercurrent philosophical sub theme stated by Tyler, that "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," is an alluring one. If that were developed further along in the storyline, then there would be some intellectual challenges to a film that tries very hard to be nihilistic but fails miserably to make a cogent case for that belief or whatever it is trying to say, such as the drivel about this being a film about freeing the masculine soul from the shackles of a consumer society. I didn't fall under Brad Pitt' spell as easily as Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter did, and therefore was not in a receptive mood for how the film was finally resolved. By the end of the film, it becomes apparent that Tyler is a dangerous psychopath and that all the charm he exhibited earlier on could not hide his evil nature.
For me, this was a lightweight film that mistakingly thinks it's in the heavyweight class. What it offers for philosophy, is similar to the kind of superficial sound bites the TV news might offer to comment on its headline stories, as the news people seem to always play it safe and never take a radical position on the events they cover. What the film offers as philosophy is pseudo-philosophy, for a story that is more steeped in violence than interested in understanding its ramifications in a consumer society. In order words, the major problem with the film, is that the filmmaker's position on where he stands is never broached. It is just too easy to be against the fascists and the yuppies, and the emptiness of their materialistic lives. But, what is the filmmaker's position about the sudden violence in society, other than being against the vacuous groups he lumps together? Exploring that avenue, and not getting bogged down in showing another escapist violent film, might have been a more radical route to have gone down. It was very hard for me to see this unconventional mainstream film as anything more than a film that showed promise and had a lot of zip to it, but was disappointing in its scope... and... was certainly not a radical film.
REVIEWED ON 10/16/99 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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