Awesome entertainment, excellent acting, muddled message

Rating: 8/10 (31 March 2015)

"Fight Club" (Fox, 1999, USA) is a David Fincher dark comedy satirizing corporate-driven materialism and follows the Narrator's (Edward Norton) violently insane search for balance in this spiritually wanting world. You'll need to suspend your disbelief to enjoy this movie, even while it raises valid points without taking itself too seriously.
The setting is anonymous urban USA (Wilmington, DE). The setting and narrator are drab and nondescript at the start.
The Narrator is an auto recall assessor by day and a cynical, insomniac who is only able to get sleep by attending support groups and weeping with unfortunates in even worse shape than he's in. As soon as Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), a chain-smoking misfit with a death wish, starts crashing the same meetings (for conditions such as blood parasites, brain tumors and testicular cancer) the Narrator can't get back to sleep and his mental condition starts deteriorating again.
Narrator and Marla make a deal to divide which groups they go to before he leaves town. On a plane, the Narrator meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cocky playboy who sells soap, wears flashy clothes and preaches nihilism. They become fast friends, hit a bar and then get into a fight, starting fight club.
Fight club is a gathering of disaffected men seeking release thru bare knuckled underground fights. It grows, becomes the first of many clubs, then becomes a kind of national movement and cult led by Tyler. The whole thing escalates into something dangerous and absurd that counters and emulates the conformity the Narrator left behind.
The movie is bleak and features sardonic humor about the ways of big business and materialism. The film posits that our society is in decline, and your Average Joe doesn't have enough room to be a man. So people limit themselves, look for fixes in all the wrong places or join fight club to regain that manly feeling.
The Narrator is a case in point. He hates his job, his company would rather let customers die than lose money on a recall, he fantasizes about IKEA, thinks he hates Marla when he really wants her, and lacks passion. BTW, he never gets called by his name, although from his narrations you might deduce that his name is Jack, but you can't be sure because he refers to himself in the 3rd person.
Edward Norton shows his chops, doing a solid job playing an alienated guy who's more passenger than driver in his own life. But as events get more insane, he begins to find his center, maybe because of the physical toll it takes on him. By the end, he has his epiphany, still standing after being ground up.
Tyler OTOH is a peacock, dynamic, persuasive and no matter how insane the idea, he's decisive. Tyler doesn't deliberate or reflect and the "random" jumps in the story other reviewers mention are most abrupt when he's up to something. He's always stirring stuff up. Tyler represents everything the Narrator wishes to be, stylish, handsome, virile, resourceful, witty, and an admired leader of men. He lives in a dilapidated house in an industrial neighborhood and sells soap made from body fat procured from the local liposuction clinic.
He talks about the uselessness of material possessions and detests social norms. He throws himself and others into danger without the slightest thought, causing mischief, danger and destruction. He starts Fight Club by inviting the Narrator to hit him. The irony is viewers must suspend *their* disbelief while characters under Tyler Durden's spell constantly re-up their misplaced faith. By the time the Narrator is able to believe in himself, catch up to Tyler and confront him on his insane antics, Armageddon has already begun.
Brad Pitt embodies what this movie is all about and his performance is the picture of extra, hyper masculinity that's inadvertently ironic. Tyler constantly questions the gym bodied, preening underwear model type images fed to us, even while Pitt represents that image, especially here. He questions the rat race, but his alternative is to siphon people off into destruction. Tyler is at the center of a study of how men who have nothing to believe in can fall into following a crazy person.
Marla Singer might be the only truly aware person in the entire movie. She appears at the most crucial points in the Narrator's development, and in spite of her off the wall craziness, Marla's relationship with the Narrator lends him a foothold on reality. She calls it like she sees it and is the only one willing to tell the Narrator how messed up he is. She's played well by Helena Bonham Carter who gives us the perfect mix of neurosis, honesty and unwitting humor to push the pace of the movie and keep us interested.
Overall the movie is highly entertaining and I recommend it. It's not as profound as some people make it out to be, but it forthrightly challenges the more greedy and superficial aspects of US culture. David Fincher's shots are great, the way the colors on the actors pop out from the grim or sterile settings really conveys the sense that insanity is what it takes to set yourself apart in the world of Fight Club. The music is unobtrusive and the film's pace is fast, sometimes bordering on frenzied, especially after the Narrator discovers the twist.
The dispiriting meta-problems of greed, vanity, soulless institutions and alienated consumer citizens don't get solved in the film. Tyler Durden's problem is he sees no value in anything except destruction. As for solutions, Fight Club entertains us with the crazy fantasy solution so we can easily dismiss it. Is it that there is no sane solution? Is it that everyone just needs to exorcise their inner demons before the solution is possible? Fight Club doesn't tell you, but it looks damn good saying what it does have to say.