Disney / Buena Vista
It’s a cliche, but Fight Club is a film even more alive now, in the age of men’s influencers and culture wars, than it was upon release in 1999. It’s almost so prescient it could be considered science fiction.
David Fincher shapes the material with his patented style of absolute control over visual overload but the film’s force comes from more than style. Jim Uhls’ script gives Chuck Palahniuk’s novel a clear screen structure, blending satire into thriller without losing its bite.
The result is a film that attacks consumer culture, masculine panic, corporate life, and self-mythology with rare confidence.
The central conceit: that post-modern first world men are so bored, underserved, and directionless that their ennui can be turned into terrorism was dangerous when it came out, but it feels like the nightly news these days.
The unnamed narrator (Edward Norton), a corporate consultant for a major auto maker, with insomnia drifts through support groups for illnesses he does not have in order to have an emotional release that will allow him to sleep, where he meets Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), whose emotional tourism reflects his own deceit. On a business trip, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap maker whose combination of caustic humor, cynicism, and worldly insight intrigues him. After the narrator’s condo explodes, he moves into Tyler’s decaying house, and the two men start the titular fight club after a night of hard drinking.
What begins as catharsis through violence becomes a paramilitary terrorist movement called Project Mayhem. Robert Paulson (Meat Loaf), a former bodybuilder from the support groups and Angel Face (Jared Leto) become Tyler’s lieutenants. As the narrator loses his grip on the world he helped create, he learns that Tyler lives a lot closer to home than he first believed.
Fincher’s direction gives the film its charge. Every frame conveys mood and energy along with plot and character. Offices, airports, basements, and apartments share the same slick and sickly texture, as if modern life is an eternal jaundiced waiting room. Fincher understands the seductive appeal of Tyler Durden and the danger inherent in that: we all want to follow the wise, the cool, the buff. He lets the audience fall under the spell of the fantasy, before taking it to its furthest logical conclusion.
Uhls’s script deserves equal credit. The dialogue is great, but the construction is magical. Norton’s voiceover pulls the viewer into the emotional point of view of the narrator and hides the central twist in plain sight. The story keeps changing shape: office satire, body-horror comedy, romance, cult thriller, psychological puzzle. Those shifts could fracture a lesser film, but it’s a credit to the screenplay that not only does the film not fall apart, it never even feels like it’s jumping around. That craftsmanship is why the film endures.
The performances complete the design. Norton gives the best performance of his career, bar none and that’s saying something. He’s fearless as the narrator and audience surrogate who has gone so far down the rabbit hole of corporate double speak in the beginning that his confessions still feel like sales pitches. Pitt is absolutely iconic as Tyler: his physical ease and rhetorical force is legendary and it’s a credit to both main actors that you can feel shades of one another’s performances in their work on repeat viewings. Bonham Carter cuts through both men’s delusions. Her Marla is damaged, funny, and human, the one figure who refuses the narrator’s self-pity. Meat Loaf brings warmth to Robert Paulson, and his character is what finally wakes the audience up to the fact that the party has gone too far.
Fight Club has been misread, quoted, idolized, and condemned, but its craft remains hard to dismiss. It is not easily categorizable and unafraid to undercut sacred cows in our culture, and so it did legitimately feel dangerous for a time.
We’re ultimately meant to reject the militarism and violence of Tyler Durden but as the 21st century unfolds before our eyes, it feels like the questions raised by Fight Club have only become more subversive and more central to our cultural discussion.
Extras include featurettes and alternate & deleted scenes.
Highly Recommended.
