# Fight Club (1999)

### reviewed by
Serdar Yegulalp

    Fight Club (1999)
    * *
    A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
    Copyright 2000 by Serdar Yegulalp

Few movies in 1999 polarized audiences like "Fight Club", which showed Gen-X men beating on each other as a way of attempting to reclaim their masculinity, or something. Three camps seem to have sprung up around the film: hose who love it, those who hate it, and those who find the other two camps wasting their time with a red herring. I'm in the third camp.

"Fight Club", at the very least, opens brilliantly, with an unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) going stir crazy in a homogenized job. The film gets a lot of good mileage out of Norton's disgust with his brand-name existence; I was reminded of Willy Loman ranting, "How can they whip cheese?". In this film, Norton paces through his apartment, obssing over housewares catalogues, while his Ikea-bought furniture all handily display closed-captioned pricetags and manufacturer's descriptions.

Norton is an insomniac, and winds up going to terminal-disease support groups as a coping mechanism. For what, we may ask? For the fact that his life is terminally pallid? How bad can his life be when there are people dying of brain cancer? That's the way he thinks about it, anyway, and for a while it works, until he meets another faker, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter). Marla and the Norton character wind up involved in a tempestuous relationship, which in this movie is a little like saying the Eiffel Tower is tall and pointy.

Things get complicated further by the presence of the handsome and engimatic soap salesman Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), whom Norton meets on one of his unending business trips. Durden seems to have a knack for telling people what they've always wanted to hear but could never find anyone else to say. This is exactly what Norton thinks he needs, and when he comes back one day to find his apartment blown up, he shacks up with Durden in a house that could only remain standing in the movies and starts plowing through his back copies of "Reader's Digest".

So far the film has been funny and knowing, and made with great skill. Then it takes a left turn that sends everything barrelling over the cliff. Durden, as it turns out, is the mastermind of an underground boxing circle known as Fight Club, where the male disenfranchised can come and feel like gods while beating the tar out of each other. The logic of this will be lost on anyone who has actually been in a fistfight, of course, but the movie is not about logic. "Fight Club" has the peculiar, subterranean arrogance of a precocious writer's first draft, where screwy little details are defended to death over massive plot holes.

Before long Fight Club is running completely out of control, and Durden and Norton are at each other's throats when they're not raiding liposuction clinics for human fat. The parallels with the Nazis are of course not going to be lost on a knowing audience, but by the time we get to such things, they no longer matter.

I suspect "Fight Club" worked better on paper, because what's on film veers between the nauseating and the ridiculous. It's one thing to write about how great it felt to smash your fists into the concrete over and over again, and quite another to actually SEE it. Film has a way of literalizing everything, even things that are designed to be fanciful, and perhaps this story (from a novel by Chuck Palahniuk) just didn't survive the translation intact.

People will say (and have said) that the film is actually "about the nature of violence", but that is approximately as honest as saying that "ID4" was "about" the value of raising funding for SETI. The movie isn't genuinely smart enough to be ABOUT that stuff -- it uses Tyler Durden and his nihilistic burpings as an excuse to show things that are by turns shocking, funny, outrageous, repellent, stupid, and then finally just tiresome. By the time we get to the "about" part, the movie's already betrayed itself, and smirks at us with its trick third act that doesn't even really explain anything. What's worse, a movie that deals ineptly with a good subject, or one which uses flashy plot mechanisms to tapdance around really dealing with it at all?

The problem isn't with David ("Seven") Fincher's extraordinary direction or the above-average performances by the cast. Let's face it, there are good people at work here: Norton's splendid; Pitt is funny when not being jerked around by the plot; Carter is unexpectedly brassy and scene-stealing. Her weirdo monologues could have been torn out and used as the centerpiece for another, better movie all by themselves.

I wanted to like "Fight Club", or at least appreciate its sardonic flashes of wit, but I could not. It's a cold, crass joke at the expense of its audience; a two-and-a-half-hour red herring that winds up being nothing at all by pretending to be about a lot of things it doesn't really understand.

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews