Mad, bad and dangerous to know

Rating: 7/10 (23 March 2003)

Fight Club is a movie of two halves. The first half establishes Edward Norton's character as dissatisfied with his life and his small job in a large organization. His initial response is to participate in support groups, which provide the emotional support lacking in the rest of his life. After a fire damages his home, however, rather than looking to any of the people he met in those groups, he seeks out Brad Pitt, whom he previously met only briefly, but who offers a more satisfying way out of the drab pettiness of his life. It is from the interactions between Norton and Pitt that the Fight Club develops. The tangible contact of fighting and feeling pain revitalizes Norton's life, and gives it a meaning previously lacking.
Although it is extremely violent and includes graphic portrayals of the effects of the fights, I enjoyed the movie to this point. It explores a theme that Pitt's character makes explicit when he talks about fighting as a means of recovering a masculine identity in a culture in which young men are brought up and feminised by, and also implicitly betrayed by, overexposure to women as mothers and teachers. The reduction of Norton to a weak, needy consumer is the outcome of that process. I was looking forward to the development of that theme when the film began its shift into the main feature of the second half - the exploration of individual psychopathology. I am being deliberately vague here because I don't want to give away detail that will spoil the film for some, but I found this aspect of the film less satisfying. This was partly because it is not a particularly good account of a dissociative disorder, but also because I was enjoying the themes of the first part of the film and wanted to see them given prominence.
However, there was still much that I enjoyed about the whole movie. I thought that all performances were very well done - not just the main characters, but some of the minor characters such as Norton's boss. Finally, the cinematography and direction help sustain dramatic tension throughout the movie. 7 / 10.