Flashback Humor

Rating: Null/10 (24 June 2000)

(Spoilers herein) Films like this frustrate. This is so competent, so engaging that I curse it for wasting the chance to say something memorable, or important or perhaps both.
What's good is the way that they've solved the `narrator problem.' here, the narrator has imagined the hero (we find out), which is rather clever. We become cocreater of the hero because the narrator has cast the whole film as a conversation with us to explain the last scene which we see in flashback at the beginning of the film. Along the way, we are reminded that we are messing with the film, and the film with us. This latter goes so far as to have the hero work as a projectionist, explaining cigarette burns. He inserts subliminal pornography, which we see throughout with a longer, more noticeable flash toward the end. When we find out about Pitt's non-existence, it is underscored by images on `video.' Add to that the inherently cinematic nature of voyeuristic personal violence, and this film has us captured.
When we return to the last scene, Pitt tells us that the whole thing is `flashback humor,' the most strongly selfreferential trick I know in film. Obviously, the self-referential notion of narrator is the reason for this film. That's why Ed Norton bought the film rights to `Motherless Brooklyn,' which exploits a similar experiment in the narrative mystery. In that case, the narrator has Tourette's.
So the film competently captures us, and then what? A wasted opportunity. My major complaint is that this film meant nothing, imparted nothing, only thumbed its nose as if to say: I can capture you as easily as the doofuses in the story and for just as capricious a reason. We deserve better. You with talent should do better.
Lesser complaints:
Norton and Pitt are excellent, though Pitt has much the simpler requirement. Why waste Helena Bonham Carter? She's got the moxie; she's been memorable before. I think the director just didn't know how to use her beyond a vapid sullenness. Another wasted opportunity.
Narrative tricks like this are best when they follow the detective story `play-fair' model. This is what `The Sixth Sense' does. On a second viewing of that film, everything works, but with new information. More, some minor problems become clearer. Not so with this film. The writers have played too fast and loose with motivations. It is rather in the `oh, that was a dream' or the `oh, time travel reversed that' category. And it could have been tidier in this regard without messing anything up.
Most every scene was weird (a good) because it ran against short-term expectations. But the scene where Lou and thug visit the fight club is pure stereotype, and predictable. Why?
I wish the last scene were more, more something. This is where it really begins to hit you that the whole thing was motivated by an illusion, with as much effect.
Bottom line: this film is so good, and its makers so talented that should be held to higher standards. I give it a 9 for competence. You should see it for that reason. But it has no purpose.