YRadio

The other DVD I got with the departed (see the departed review) is fight club, the classic dark and surreal thriller by director David Fincher starring the utterly brilliant Edward Norton and the expensive but surprisingly good Brad Pitt with Helena Boham carter as part of the supporting cast. I've seen this film quite a few times but now having seen it again until recently for the first time in a while then I started thinking about the significance of this particular film and whether it really works in its attempt to confuse, irritate (in a good way) and baffle its viewer into thinking about the different themes leaking out of the film.

David Fincher himself stated on the DVD

that the homoerotic tendencies were a way of making the audience uncomfortable and compared the films intent to the classic films the graduate and rebel without a cause. In that sense the film accomplishes that feeling significantly, with the violence and language coupled with Edward Nortons brilliant voiceovers letting you feel that all is not exactly what it seems. I have to say that I am a fan of Fincher since he directed alien 3, ok it wasn't that great but it was ok and certainly better than alien resurrection and Fincher does claim he was cut out from making the film the way he wanted to and therefore tries to disassociate himself from the film. He did after that though, make the psychological thriller Seven that also starred Brad Pitt and the brilliant Morgan Freeman that was very similar to the way fight club is build up. As in it makes you feel uneasy and confused which keeps building towards the unexpected twist at the end. So In that sense it is not surprising that Fincher made Fight Club after Seven and is good at creating this kind of dark film that is cleverly and unnervingly efficient in making you look for underlying solutions within the film to make it all make sense.

For those not familiar with fight club, it is about an unnamed protagonist played by Norton who is sick of the everyday office job he has and meets a soap maker called Tyler Durden and forms a fight club in a local bar, while becoming involved in a relationship with Helena Bonham Carters character marl singer, an insecure and suicidal women he meets at a cancer support group. When Fincher compares the film to the graduate, I can see he means the kind of polar opposite to that film in that instead of a guy with many possibilities to fulfil himself Nortons character has no possibilities in the film and spend his time throughout the film trying to find enlightenment. The criticism the film has always generated is its unapologetic use of violence, but if you put the whole film into perspective you then realise that it is a substantial metaphor for the emasculation that the character is going through from beginning to end. Brad Pitts character Tyler Durden shows Norton Character that you don't need a fancy apartment and a job to explore what type of person you want to be, hence why the idea of fight club gets generated through Nortons character explaining how much he hates his job through the violence he starts to use when he first meets Tyler. If you can see the reasoning behind the use of violence as a form of expression than you can see that it is totally justified in order to convey the social emasculation that Nortons character is going through.

However, the film is not without criticism. One critic in particular pointed out that Helena Carters character is not exploring enough in the film, a sentiment I happen to agree with. Once Marla Singer (Carter) is introduced early in the film, she is overplayed by the notion that she is insecure and lonely and appears in the film majority of the time as an annoyance rather than a character. It is a classic case of using a specific character as a plot device rather than developing the character further which in turn would convey the main protagonists suffering in a more distinct light. I can understand though why Fincher would exclude Marla Singer from being in the film too much as it could of lead to giving the game away, I just think Helena Bonham Carter is good in the film and if given more time would of been great in the film.

So the conclusion? As I said earlier Edward Norton is ridiculously great in this film, a film that he did not long after making Tony Cay's American History X which he is also brilliant in. The way that Norton carries the audience along through the devotion of showing the torment the character is going through makes you really believe that his character has a very loose grounding in reality. This, as well as Finchers very clever direction in confusing and crossovers scenes, leads you in an unsure yet more importantly anticipatory way towards the twist ending, where it all makes sense and the whole justification for the film is established. The dedication in the film is noticeable, such as the fact that Norton gets thinner as the film progresses and Pitt gets more manly and fitter to convey that Norton's character wants to be more like Tyler and starts getting jealous and resenting him being around. Pitts fairly good in this, he has a long association with Fincher from the film Seven through this film to Benjamin Button so my advice to him (not that he'd care) is to keep asking Fincher for work because it is clearly Brad Pitts best films when he is around. All in all, it is a very good film, its not without its minor faults but its watchable even after a few times but its certainly not something you'd watch all the time. But it is clever, well casted and as an identity themed film, it makes you think, which is never a bad thing in my eyes.

Overall YRadio Score

79%