Fight Club

FIGHT CLUB

Rating: B
Edward Norton's character in Fight Club is a young man who, by all outside appearances, has it made. He has a lucrative job in a Fortune 500 company, a posh apartment, and disposable income up the wazoo. Yet inwardly he lives the same life of quiet desperation that Kevin Spacey experiences in American Beauty. Like the latter film, Fight Club is about the lead character rebelling against his self-made entrapment, but where Spacey sought happiness within the confines of the society he knew, Norton finds the only antidote to society is destroying it.

Helping him on his quest are two friends he meets along the way, played by Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. Each is a societal misfit in their own right, but Pitt chooses to act out his alienation by being the consumate iconoclast, inserting racy subliminal frames into the films he projects at the theater and adding his own "personal" ingredient to the chowder at a local restaurant. Carter's anger is more passively aggressive, whether it be pilfering clothing from the laundromat or attempting suicide to gain attention. The two serve as opposite sides of the same coin in Norton's predicament: the desire to lash out at society for making his life worthless, and the self-hate he feels because his life, in his eyes, is worthless.

When Pitt and Norton playfully start to scuffle in one scene, they inadvertently discover an outlet for the rage and frustration pent up inside themselves. They soon learn they have lots of spiritual company in other male members of the working class, and Fight Club is born. Director David Fincher pulls no punches in detailing the brutality of these encounters, and more than once the cruelty depicted goes overboard. He would probably argue that anything less would be sugar coating the rage to which he is trying to lend a voice, but the fact remains that if you plan on seeing this movie, prepare yourself for some disturbing scenes of men gratuitously inflicting violence upon one another.

Like its contemporary The Sixth Sense, Fight Club has a surprise twist near its end. But it's not clear here that the twist improves the plot. In one sense, it does add another dimension to the story (which, if detailed here, would give the twist away). On the other hand, it completely changes the meaning of some of the most effective scenes which went before it. See the film and decide for yourself. Either way, you'll be treated to a final stunning shot which will bring down the house.