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Fight Club

1999, Movie, R, 139 mins

Fight Club: Review

A bracing, mesmerizing, bitterly funny and deeply unsettling fable about disaffected, emotionally emasculated young men whose search for meaning leads straight to their inner bare-knuckle brawler. Fight Club is the brain child — make that brainless, testosterone-fueled gut child — of scruffy wild boy Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and a nameless, insomniac cubicle slave (Edward Norton). They meet on a plane, bond over the coincidence that they're carrying the exact same briefcase (though Tyler's is full of the chi-chi soap he sells to high-end boutiques, while our office peon's bag is packed with papers). A freak accident blows our protagonist's tastefully appointed apartment to kingdom come and propels him first into Tyler's pestilent house on the industrial side of town, and then into a bloody, sweaty journey of self-discovery that never goes quite where you think it's going. Faithfully adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's novel, Fincher's film is a brilliantly realized series of sucker punches, a philosophical howl disguised as a muscular guy movie. Neither Palahniuk nor Fincher is onto anything especially new: The plight of the post-feminist, post-war generation of men without fathers, coming-of-age rituals or meaningful jobs launched the Iron John movement and keeps an army of therapists in clover. But Palahniuk nails the searing alienation and directs it into something simultaneously horrifying and logical (not for nothing is he regularly compared to J.G. Ballard); in his hands Fight Club and its successor, the anarchic Project Mayhem, seem perfectly reasonable alternatives to spiritual suicide, one expense report at a time. Fincher translates Palahniuk's muscular prose into viscerally powerful images as fresh and invigorating as they are profoundly disturbing. He also gives Pitt and Norton the room to deliver what may be the best performances of their careers to date; Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf and Jared Leto are equally striking in supporting roles. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh