 Fight Club (1999) Fight Club pursues the fantasy to extremes of violence, aggression, delusion of grandeur, and ultimate antisocial impact. Although it seems like a deep film, its ideas are hardly radical, the story is cartoonish, and I don't believe that anything of great weight or substance is really being said. What it is, though, is fucking cool. Edward Norton plays a guy who is losing his grip on reality, becoming lost in the rabbit hole of his own festering psyche. He's going to support groups that do not apply to him as a means of getting any kind of human connection out of an empty life that sees self-expression mainly through materialism. The support group angle is a clever update of the Harold and Maude joke of attending funerals for recreation. This film is as dark but not as comic as that one. It does have a relationship develop in a similar way (Norton meets Helena Bonham-Carter after noticing her at several overlapping meetings), but beyond that, Fight Club is in its own world. There's some great black humor ("I haven't been fucked like that since grade school!"), but this isn't comedy per se. Brad Pitt is the enigmatic mentor figure who lets Norton's primal side out into the world. What starts as a journey to seek some kind of visceral release through physical fighting develops into a militia-type situation that spirals well out of control and results in terrorism, etc, etc. The film's not as tricky as it thinks it is, but it is so inherently cool that its flaws kinda don't matter. It's visually amazing and exceedingly well acted. Bonham-Carter is really good here (though she's kind of becoming annoying by now, don't you think?), and supporting turns by Meat Loaf Aday and Jared Leto are well done. Leto in particular does some great things with a fairly tiny role. *Sigh* That's what my first wife used to say about me, but in slightly different words. Throw in a propulsive score by the Dust Brothers, plenty of fightin', some great corporate America revenge scenes, and you have a good yarn that is well worth the time invested. The direction is dense and meticulous, so it stands up to repeat viewings very well. The DVD version features an entire extra disc of bonus material (deleted scenes and whatall), but I only watched about 20 minutes of that stuff before the ol' attention span had me onto something else. Well, of course I'm talking about masturbation, what else would it be?
Review by Anderson |