director
David Fincher
screenwriter
Jim Uhls
based on
the novel by
Chuck Palahniuk
producers
Ross Grayson Bell
Ceán Chaffin
Art Linson
cinematographer
Jeff Cronenweth
music
The Dust Brothers
editor
James Haygood
cast
Brad Pitt (Tyler Durden)
Edward Norton (Narrator)
Helena Bonham Carter (Marla Singer)
Meat Loaf Aday (Bob)
Jared Leto (Angel Face)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 139m
u.s.
release: October 15,
1999
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other david
fincher films
reviewed on this website:
- panic
room
- seven
see also:
- chuck
amok,
an essay on
chuck palahniuk's first three novels
|
In
Fight Club, the self-consciously "daring" new
adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's excellent cult novel, men assemble
and pound one another in dank basements; they spit blood and
teeth and then return for more next week. When this isn't enough
for them, they wage war on our consumerist culture with media-friendly,
attention-getting pranks that escalate into mass destruction.
I bought all this in the book, because Palahniuk's fevered first-person
narration puts you inside the exhausted rage of powerless young
men who are sick of it all. A movie, however, can be a delicate
animal, and this one begins boldly and gradually dies.
What happened? The screenplay, by first-timer Jim Uhls, is pretty
loyal to the novel; the Narrator, a nameless corporate drudge
played by Edward Norton, delivers many of the book's best lines
in sarcastic voice-over. But -- and here I must step very lightly
in order to avoid major spoilers -- what worked on the page,
especially the credibility-stretching plot twist, comes off labored
on the screen. Readers of the book may sit there wondering how
director David Fincher (Seven)
will sustain the illusion from scene to scene. Newcomers, in
turn, may wonder why many of the scenes are so stilted, with
characters entering and exiting as in a screwball play. And when
the surprise is sprung, nobody in the audience so much as gasps.
Fincher zeroes in on the dark heart of whatever material he's
given, and in Fight Club his camera burrows around in
modern anxiety like a cyberworm munching holes through web pages
of narrative. The show-offy tone at the start -- whee, let the
ride begin! -- provides some prickly fun for about the first
twenty minutes. And when the sad-sack Narrator meets his future
guru -- Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), glorious Zen master of chaos
-- the unstable interaction between Pitt (who's quite effective)
and Norton (who's atypically dull here when he doesn't have Pitt
to play off) prepares us for a new, stark kind of millennial
buddy movie. Tyler and his new disciple start Fight Club, where
men savage each other all night; they move in together and live
cheerfully in squalor, like a couple of college freshmen.
But then, inevitably and sadly, Fight Club begins to lose
steam. We watch the sweaty, half-naked men grapple in rabid ecstasies
of blood and torn flesh, and it looks like nothing we'd want
to try. (Pundits worried about copycat fight clubs can relax.)
We watch the three leads -- rounded out by Marla (Helena Bonham
Carter, wasted here), a morbid dark flower who beds Tyler --
and they hardly seem like functioning persons. When Tyler's faceless
fight-clubbers graduate into black-clad terrorists -- "space
monkeys" -- making soap and nitroglycerin out of human fat,
we wonder why nobody ever notices what's going on. The satirical
metaphor of the book is flattened out, made literal, by the frame-by-frame
realism of a movie; Fincher exhausts his tricks early on, and
he poops out.
Chuck Palahniuk hasn't been mentioned much in the reviews of
Fight Club, except occasionally to point out that he wrote
the book it's based on. Thus, Fincher is getting the credit,
as well as the scorn (in negative reviews), for the ideas presented
in the movie. This, as usual, is the auteur theory in
full bullshit mode. What Fincher does here is to film, sometimes
quite skillfully, the passages that Jim Uhls has transferred
more or less intact from Palahniuk. On that level -- watching
the scene-by-scene dramatization of a book I admire -- I enjoyed
much of the movie. It also needs to be said that this is generally
miles above your standard Hollywood adaptation. Most directors
and screenwriters might have left out Bob (Meat Loaf), a testicular-cancer
survivor whose hormone therapy has endowed him with "bitch
tits"; they might have left out the whole subplot dealing
with the Narrator's addiction to attending support groups for
illnesses he doesn't have. The movie has its moments of inspiration
-- it's far from a dud. But it may also be yet another example
of a book that was just fine as a book -- that didn't need to
be made into a film.
Fincher wants Fight Club to be a transgressive, loony
pop artifact on the level of A Clockwork Orange and Natural Born
Killers; he wants to make, in Tyler's words, a beautiful
and unique snowflake. Yet despite the spasmodic camera gags --
some of which are fun -- Fight Club feels less like the
trailblazing cinematic critique it's meant to be, and more like
a clever rock video. It doesn't help that Three
Kings, with its guided tour of an infected bullet wound,
has stolen Fincher's thunder. Fight Club has a veneer
of stylistic radicalism, but when it comes to the moments of
ultraviolence, nothing really challenges us. The explosions are
just explosions; the punches are just punches. (We get guided
tours of wastebaskets and refrigerators -- why? -- but no tours
of the splintered teeth in a punched face.) Fincher also blows
a nice visual running gag that Palahniuk's book lobbed right
into his lap. Earlier, crying into Bob's bosom, the Narrator
leaves a wet impression of his tear-soaked face on Bob's shirt.
Later, the Narrator gets his face slammed into the cement floor
during Fight Club. In the book, his face leaves a mask of blood
on the floor similar to the mask of tears on the shirt -- a flat
reflection of his face in extremis. In the movie, it's just a
splatter of blood. The whole movie is essentially just
a splatter of blood, with surprisingly little resonance -- it's
just spew and spurt all the way down, all ejaculation and no
penetration, like a porno loop. This is not a beautiful and unique
snowflake.
Who is Tyler Durden? The casting of golden boy Brad Pitt ("I
look the way you want to look," Tyler rants, "I fuck
the way you want to fuck") as a sort of ubermensch, contrasted
with Norton's just plain mensch, is a pretty decent joke. What
we see on the screen is a hipster rebel, a goateed Mephisto orchestrating
terror and spouting Palahniuk's juiciest lines slamming the culture.
He's unavoidably attractive, if not quite a role model, and Pitt
gives the movie a slight tremble of subversiveness, like a pumped-up
Jeffrey Goines who's been reading Nietzsche and Zen Buddhism.
By movie's end, after his true nature is revealed, Tyler is just
as unavoidably diminished. We then have to watch the hapless
Narrator race around trying to undo everything Tyler has set
in motion, the dreary Marla (who was, I admit, just as dreary
in the book) fades from view, and the movie begins to sputter
into a nosedive. The final scenes, which try to have it both
ways and lack the chill of Palahniuk's original ending, are borderline
embarrassing.
Certain images, certain surrealistically funny bits of business,
occasionally made me think "I have to buy this on
DVD," which is in hilarious opposition to the anti-consumerist
message the movie is selling. Reading the book, I wasn't thinking
about DVDs. Palahniuk made you ponder the lost masculinity of
a generation, the ease with which a charismatic brute like Tyler
can assemble disgruntled men and unite them in chaos. The book
is a modern horror story about how populist fascism can flourish
here, and about why this is the perfect time for it. (The detail
of soap made of human fat is no accident.) The movie, unfortunately,
is a stylish blank, a countercultural advertisement just as slick
as the ads it claims to disdain. The last reel, which departs
from the book and gives us movie-ish thrills we've seen a hundred
times before, is about as saddening a commentary on Hollywood
as any I've witnessed. What's even sadder is that those involved
with Fight Club think they've made something scathing
and radical, and that some viewers might agree with them. |