Bare-knuckled Fight is a KO

Fight Club
****

If you've been reading much of anything in the media lately, you've probably heard a lot about the new movie by David Fincher, the man responsible for Seven and The Game. It is the controversial Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club is an amazing, important film that everyone but overly suggestible psychopaths need to see. It says so much about America and its citizens that needed to be said in this format.

It starts off as a black comedy. Jack (Edward Norton, in another excellent performance) is an insomniac cubicle monkey who finds relief by going to group therapy sessions for diseases he doesn't have, like testicular cancer. His sleep is untroubled until he finds Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a thrift-store girl who attends many of the same meetings and thereby ruins his enjoyment of them. They agree to split them up, and Jack is temporarily relieved.

His happiness is short lived. Jack soon meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt, in a performance that will make you forget Meet Joe Black and remember, with glee, 12 Monkeys), a charismatic soap salesman, and eventually moves into Tyler's ratty-ass house in an industrial district. Tyler and Jack go to a bar; afterward, they take turns punching each other, just to see what it feels like. Other men join in, and eventually, the first Fight Club - a place for dissatisfied men to beat each other for a few minutes at a time - is born.

From there, the movie spirals off in an unexpected direction. Fight Club becomes Project Mayhem, and Tyler, drawing on the large, rabid Fight Club membership, creates a mercenary force bent on social disruption that eventually becomes wholesale terrorism. Tyler becomes something of a messiah, and Jack is increasingly alienated. To say more would ruin the movie, but suffice it to say you'll be surprised.

There is exactly one gun and one death in this movie, and they're both treated with a lot of attention and humanity. Yet Fight Club has been dismissed by some in the media as an excessively "violent" movie. Why? To be sure, the sounds and the sights of men punching each other are everywhere. But the film doesn't glorify the violence or make it pretty; when these men are done with each other, they're in pain, and they're frequently disfigured. So it is violent, true, and exciting, but not in unrealistic fashion, which is the criticism so often leveled at movies. It's real, it happens, it's easy and it's scary that people might discover that. But it's also something that simply can't be ignored.

Others have expressed worry at the seemingly "fascist" nature of Project Mayhem, especially in the fanaticism, facelessness and blind loyalty of its participants to Tyler. But here, as in many other criticisms, critics seem to be reviewing the hype rather than the film itself. We view the story through the eyes of Jack, who, after a brief period of approval, steadfastly resists and rails against Tyler's fascist tendencies.

Finally, there's the accusation that the movie's style contradicts its substance. Fight Club is a very "slick" movie, and in some ways this does clash with the message it's trying to convey, especially when it shows the scenes of dirty, run-down locations that end up looking all art designed. But that's a minor thematic quibble. Fincher has done an amazing job here, creating a work that's dark and beautiful, capturing perfectly the manic nature of Jack's insomnia and Tyler's charisma. This is a Warner Brothers movie, after all, and not an indie parable, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. This movie has both the visuals to draw in a mainstream crowd and the chops to make it worthwhile. There is the danger that what it's saying could be lost, but it's a risk they had to take.

Ultimately, Fight Club does have a lot to say about the need to regain a measure of physicality in our increasingly mental lives, the conformity encouraged by a consumerist culture and the realization that escape from conformity comes not through therapy groups, but through individual discovery. There's a lot going on here, and it's easy to get caught up in the hype and the criticism. So forget what you've heard, go see Fight Club and allow yourself to see with a clear open mind.