Ladies and gentlemen,welcome to Fight Club...

Rating: 10/10 (14 September 2005)

There is a huge misconception regarding this movie: a superficial plot summary will dismiss it as a hyper-violent thriller with fascist undertones (in fact, Roger Ebert called it "the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish"). Some even refer to it as a '90s version of Kubrick's masterpiece A Clockwork Orange, with added blood. Such descriptions are very reductive and misleading.
It may be very violent at times (the most gruesome bits make Scorsese's movies look rather tame), that's undeniable, but Fight Club is much more than that. Its complex, non-linear and fascinating script (based on the eponymous cult novel) deals with revolution, madness, and yes, fascism on a certain level, and the film's greatness lies in how David Fincher, who had already shown his edgy talent on Se7en and is at the top of his game here, combines those themes to comment on our society. That's right, beneath the gore and anarchic atmosphere lies a carefully constructed, though not very subtle, satire on consumerism (as Brad Pitt's character puts it: "Advertising has us chasing sports cars and clothes, working jobs we hate, so we can buy sh*t we don't need").
The film stars Edward Norton as a nameless, bored, insomniac office geek who's trying to find a meaning for his life. In order to do this he starts attending various support groups, even though he has none of the diseases (testicular cancer among them) dealt with in those groups.This is when he meets Marla Singer (an almost unrecognizable Helena Bonham Carter), a woman who fakes as much as he does, and accuses her of messing up his life. The real mess, however, starts when the Narrator runs into Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt): this guy claims to be a simple soap producer and salesman, but in reality he's a rebel, a psychopath who thinks people truly know themselves only after they have been in a fight. Together, the two create Fight Club, an illegal association where frustrated men in their thirties can unleash all their suppressed rage, as long as they follow some simple rules (as a matter of fact, writing this review constitutes a violation of the first two). But as everyone knows, violence creates more violence, and soon enough what started as an unusual way to deal with boredom becomes an increasingly dangerous game of manipulation and destruction.
Said manipulation suits Fincher well, the dark, bizarrely funny universe he has created serving as a tool to reflect not only on the changing society, but also on film itself as an art-form. While the characters break the rules on screen, the director breaks them on his own work, frequently exposing the fictional nature of what is being shown (the characters address the audience directly, a pornographic frame Tyler inserts in a family movie pops up in the actual film). In the middle of this controlled chaos, Fincher can rely on a marvelous cast: Norton is mesmerizing, seamlessly moving from total apathy to fearful awareness; Bonham Carter still has to find a role as demanding, compelling and rewarding as Marla; as for Brad Pitt, he shamelessly steals the show from start to finish, perfecting the edge he had started to develop in Se7en and giving us his best performance ever. Incendiary and effortlessly cool, his only real turn as a villain is a mix of style, darkness and charisma that has been missing in every character he has played since..
An absolute masterpiece, albeit one that demands at least a second viewing before it can be completely understood and embraced, Fight Club is one of the greatest movies of the '90s, perhaps even THE best of the entire decade.
Totally unmissable