Fight Club (1999) / Brad Pitt Filmography

Summary: The Fight Club is an extremely well-made but rather muddle-headed film that delivers a solid blow to the belly, yet does not stand up to rigorous intellectual examination. The film is best when it skewers some of the odious aspects of our consumer society. When Jack (Ed Norton) and Tyler (Brad Pitt) steal the fat from a liposuction clinic in order to make designer soap, which they then sell to fashionable boutiques at twenty dollars a bar so that the women who frequented the clinic can go home and wash themselves with their own fat is so richly layered in irony, that one cannot help but laugh. We are, they note, slaves in white collars working for companies where everything and everybody is a copy of a copy of a copy.

"Self improvement is masturbation. Now self destruction…" Tyler's words betray the Nietzchean ethos of the Fight Club, a subterranean after hours club of brutal fisticuffs that injects meaning into the lives of the benumbed participants. There, they assert the masculinity that has been robbed from them in lives governed by routine. "You weren't alive anywhere like you were there," notes Jack. Fighting is a religion, "like being in a Pentecostal church where everybody is speaking in tongues," which is an ironically appropriate analogy for the confused ideas at the centre of this film.

Fight Club is obsessed with man's emasculation at the hands of a culture that has made us soft. "We are a generation raised by women," notes Tyler. The film is punctuated with platitudes that would be amusing if they weren't meant to be taken seriously. Tyler shouts, "Let's evolve! And let the chips fall where they may." "Things you own end up owning you." "We are God's unwanted children." It is surprising that the filmmakers elected to go that extra step back into their Nietzchean cave and declare that "God is dead, so everything is permitted." Where do we go with this knowledge? The film's final scenes show us. "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone is zero."

Review: Pre-release interest in Fight Club was understandably high, primarily because of those involved with the project. Jim Uhls' script is based on an influential novel by Chuck Palahniuk (a book that, while not required material in schools, has consumed the free time of countless readers). The lead actor is the ever-popular Brad Pitt, who makes his strongest bid to date to shed his pretty boy image and don the mantle of a serious thespian. Those dubious about Pitt's ability to pull this off in the wake of his recent attempts in Seven Years in Tibet (which is briefly referenced as an in-joke during Fight Club) and Meet Joe Black will suffer a change of heart after seeing this film. Pitt's male co-star, Edward Norton, is widely recognized as one of the most intelligent and versatile performers of his generation. And Fight Club's director, David Fincher, has already made a huge artistic impression on movie-goers with only three features to his credit: Alien 3, Seven (starring Pitt), and The Game. Mix these elements together in Fox's publicity blender, and Fight Club will not carry the title of "Best Movie of 1999 That No One Saw."

The film has a scope not hinted at in the trailers. After all, how could 139 minutes of untrained boxers beating the hell out of each other be interesting? Fight Club doesn't need to address that question, because its agenda is much larger. To reveal more, however, would be to disclose twists and surprises best left for each viewer to uncover during his or her own movie-going experience. Of course, as is true of all great films, it is possible to know the entire plot of Fight Club beforehand and still be blown away by the experience.

Genres: Drama, Crime, Thriller

Runtime: 139 min.

Release Date: October 15, 1999

MPAA Rating: R (for disturbing and graphic depiction of violent anti-social behavior, sexuality)

Awards:

Best Sound Effects Editing (nom) - Ren Klyce - 1999 Academy,

Best Sound Effects Editing (nom) - Richard Hymns - 1999 Academy

Country: Germany / USA

Language: English

Color: Color

Sound Mix: DTS / Dolby EX 6.1

Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox