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Nearly a decade after its release I finally saw this 1999 Brad Pitt/Edward Norton cult classic that, more than anything else, reminds me of a dramatic version of Office Space. Both are highly negative looks at the life of a modern corporate worker, or white collar slave as Pitt’s character Tyler Durden calls them. I like to think that, with my focus on leading edge technology and preference for the startup life, neither movie is really talking about me but that could be simple self-deception.
Fight Club begins with The Narrator (Norton, whose character is never addressed by name) showing us how attending various 12 step and illness support group meetings is the only cure for his insomnia; he also meets fellow impostor Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a woman who attends as many of these as him.
Then our boy (the character is referred to as The Narrator since throughout Fight Club he, well, narrates) returns from yet another pointless business trip to find his apartment in flames. Everything in it is a complete loss with firefighters struggling to contain the damage. This is just after (I think) he’s explained having a serious Ikea addiction.
On the flight he met Durden and with nowhere else to go he phones him to meet for a beer. A few drinks later Tyler gets the Narrator to admit his real purpose was to ask for a place to crash. Then Tyler asks to be punched and the club is born. Somehow word gets out and frustrated men (exclusively men) show up to join; the Narrator moves into the decrepit, off the map house Durden squats in and blackmails his boss into a no-show job, complete with lots of plane tickets, and local chapters get launched all over.
Meanwhile Durden and Marla hook up. Constantly and loudly, much to the Narrator’s annoyance, though the two don’t seem capable of a direct conversation and, even more annoying, use him as an intermediary.
In the final act of the movie, the club moves on to a direct assault on American business. If the job Norton’s character held early on was a 9mm handgun, Project Mayhem is a few tons of homebrew terrorist explosive. The Narrator finally wakes up to the Sixth Sense-ish twist on reality, perhaps a shade too late, though by then we’re (the audience) no longer able to decide what’s real and what’s, er, inside his head.
Novelist Chuck Palahniuk and scriptwriter Jim Uhls (his first feature credit, Uhls also wrote the recently released Jumper) took the humor of Bill Lumbergh’s constant deadpan reminders to turn in TPS reports, to work weekends, and said screw that, let’s just go right to the heart of the problem: modern workers allow themselves to be turned into nameless slaves kept passive through mindless consumerism built on top of advertising hammered right to their brain’s indiscriminating pleasure center.
Director David Fincher, who previously worked with Pitt in the nasty Se7en and will again in a new production of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button coming this Christmas, matches the visuals, particularly the sets, to the plot an dialog; that house Pitt and Norton share was an outstanding choice and the ways it changes over the course of the movie provides a mirror to the evolution of the Fight Club and the club members.
The three leads pull off some difficult acting assignments, the two men especially needing to be great to make the movie succeed and sell the last-innings twist. Meat Loaf has a great turn as a guy who connects with the Narrator early on at one of those support groups and then joins the club and both Zach Grenier and (a very dyed blonde) Jared Leto do well in smaller roles.
recommended
