a dark comic male fantasia for the new millennium

Rating: 8/10 (17 November 2010)

As we approached that totally arbitrary year 2000 it seemed Hollywood movies were becoming darker and more pessimistic, or at least (to be more accurate) were being marketed to give that impression. A perfect case in point was this violent, cynical fantasy about disenfranchised men getting even with an unsympathetic world by bonding together to beat the living pulp out of each other.
It's called 'Fight Club', and Brad Pitt is the charismatic psychopath who kicks it (sometimes literally) into gear, enlisting insomniac everyman Ed Norton into a netherworld of black eyes and broken noses. Pitt only wants his otherwise mild-mannered new protégé to embrace his own dormant masculinity at its lowest and most honest level, and in a sense the eponymous club is presented like the ultimate touchy-feely support group, offering members the epiphany of uncomplicated pain as an antidote to the numbing monotony of modern life.
But what begins as a strictly masochistic form of macho catharsis soon devolves into an underground skinhead cult promoting worldwide anarchy and destruction. And if, after reading that, you suspect this is where the plot gets derailed, give yourself a pat on the back and a blue ribbon for eagle-eyed film analysis.
'Fight Club' is a disturbing movie, not least because it can, at times, be a lot of fun to watch, in an admittedly twisted sort of way. Viewers are invited to chuckle in sympathy at thoughtless acts of petty rebellion such as waiters urinating in the soup at pretentious uptown restaurants, or (my favorite) the 'homework' assignment asking club members to pick a fight at random with a total stranger, and lose – not an easy task, as it turns out. And let's face it: who among us hasn't entertained daydreams of demolishing a tacky piece of corporate public art or destroying a generic coffee franchise (or, better yet, accomplishing both at the same time)? Boys will be boys, but a lot of that guilty juvenile pleasure gets pushed aside when the anti-establishment vandalism turns to wholesale sabotage and terrorism. It's too bad, because elsewhere the film presents a canny dissection of the American male psyche: not an altogether pleasant topic, but certainly ripe for exactly this shade of black comic satire. Few other movies have dared to approach the same subject with such unblinking candor (the closest recent equivalent was probably Neil LaBute's 1997 feature 'In the Company of Men', a minor classic of y-chromosome misanthropy), and none with this degree of microscopic scrutiny.
It even begins, pointedly, at a subatomic level, tracing the feverish sparking of nerve impulses across poor Ed Norton's sleep deprived synapses. From there the focus expands upwards and outwards, targeting all the usual suspects of our late 20th century social stalemate: the credit card economy, the empty consumer culture, the slow brain-death of a television habit (of course), the empty paycheck at the end of another dull day's meaningless labor. "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time", says the desensitized Norton, a white collar wage slave unable to find any emotional release outside of other people's support networks: terminal cancer patients, adult survivors of childhood incest, alcoholics anonymous, and so forth.
Until the fateful moment when he first crosses the path of kindred spirit/alter ego Tyler Durden, one of the more compelling anti-heroes (for better or worse) in recent screen memory, brought vividly to life in a typically extroverted performance by Brad Pitt. Durden is Norton's dark companion: a post-modern messiah preaching a gospel of enlightened self-destruction. "Forget redemption", he tells his disciples (although he doesn't actually use the word forget), "we are God's unwanted children." That's a lot of philosophy to swallow in one sitting, but over most of its (considerable) length the film successfully negotiates a precarious narrative tightrope between brilliance and pretension. Unfortunately the chosen method of discourse in the adapted screenplay by Jim Uhls is non-stop voice-over narration, the laziest tool in the arsenal any hack (and a pet peeve, to be sure). Movies work best when used as a model of visual, not verbal, expression, showing (or better yet, merely suggesting) the meaning of things, instead of artlessly spelling out the intended lesson in exactly so many words.
To be fair, director David Fincher does his best to open up the format and have some fun with it, for example asking Norton to address the camera directly (spoiling Pitt's aim while he's peeing in the lobster bisque), and employing a typically hyperactive visual scheme stocked with every up-to-the-minute gimmick imaginable, all set to an effective electro-shock soundtrack by a team calling themselves The Dust Brothers. The sets are likewise dressed to the acme of stylish decay (an apparent specialty of Fincher), and attentive viewers will even catch some ultra-cool subliminal foreshadowing: strategic single frame inserts of Tyler Durden popping up at random, anticipating his first appearance by several scenes.
But after setting up such a novel premise the script quickly runs out of first-person prose, having exhausted itself on hackneyed pearls of Occidental wisdom such as: "the things you own end up owning you", perfectly true, but hardly the most original observation. With nowhere else to go and nothing left to say, the story collapses quickly to a desperately over-plotted climax, losing the thread of its already subversive sexual aggression sub-text to foreground the 'Project Mayhem' conspiracy agenda, and finally introducing a ludicrous doppelganger dénouement too far-fetched for even an old Twilight Zone episode.
Bottom line: it's a provocative movie at odds with its own ambition, leaning hard on a necessary crutch on black (bordering on tasteless) humor. Ignoring all the stylistic window dressing, the film is also more cynical, and in many ways more original, than anything since the pre-Lucas/Spielberg '70s: think of William Friedkin's 'Sorcerer', written for laughs. That, by itself, is enough reason to recommend it, but is this where one hundred years of screen art have brought us?