You've probably seen the previews for Fight Club and assume you know what it is: a simple but violent tale of bored young men who turn to underground fisticuffs to prove they're alive. And it's got Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, with bloodied noses and no shirts.
Folks, that ain't the half of it.
Fight Club is a startling, in-your-face, darkly nihilistic saga of life at the end of the millennium. It's a thought-provoking mind-bender, a wake-up punch to our collective solar plexus.
Edward Norton stars as the central character, known only as the narrator. He has a dead-end job in the auto industry: He computes how many life-threatening car flaws can be tolerated before the company is forced to issue a recall. How's that for a cynical occupation?Hungry for status and stimulus, he turns his apartment into a virtual IKEA discount catalog. But nothing helps him escape his boredom until he runs into Tyler Durden (Pitt), a wildly rebellious fellow who lives to shock people.
Sporting crazy clothes and speaking his mind freely, Durden likes nothing better than picking fights.
In no time at all, Durden and the narrator find themselves punching each other silly in a parking lot. They draw blood, then a crowd. It turns out a lot of men share their frustrations with the ennui of modern life.
Fight Club is formally started -- with all members sworn to secrecy.
Soon, fighting each other isn't enough of a release. Durden starts handing out "homework assignments" -- demands for fights with total strangers. Then the club starts to stockpile weapons and explosives for mass destruction.
That's when the relationship between Durden and our hero becomes strained. They also become competitive over a grungy young woman (a surprising Helena Bonham Carter) who's alternately high strung and strung out.
Both Norton's and Pitt's portrayals are superb. Pitt dives in with a daring, high-wire performance as the frightening and charismatic Durden. And despite his restraint, Norton lets us feel all the narrator's pain, confusion, anger and hunger.
Directed by David Fincher (of Seven fame), Fight Club marks the debut of screenwriter Jim Uhls, a formidable talent. He's fashioned a brazen satire as violent and unsettling as A Clockwork Orange, specifically attuned to life in the late 1990s.
While Pitt and Norton aim at each other's jaws, the film targets the greed and waste of the consumer society and the self-centered attitudes and violent nature of people whose only contact comes while beating each other up.
Fight Club can be seen as a companion piece to American Beauty, another startling commentary (by another first-time writer) on the waning months of the 20th century. While American Beauty uses sexual fantasy to trigger its central character's mid-life crisis, Fight Club explores a man affected by violence, self-loathing and schizophrenia.
So if you're looking for a simple-minded saga of violent brawlers -- the sort of film Sly Stallone might have made a decade ago -- Fight Club isn't it.
To which I say, hooray.
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