David Fincher’s Fight Club is an engrossing, cruelly funny satire of male grievance, with Edward Norton and Brad Pitt making its appeal disturbingly clear. The speeches can grow tiresome, but the performances keep the self-pity recognisable and the violence uncomfortable.
David Fincher’s Fight Club understands how pleasant it can be to hear someone else announce that everything is rotten. It is a forceful, often funny film about men whose disgust with ordinary life makes them susceptible to anyone offering permission to behave badly. Fincher gives that temptation room to work, and the result is uncomfortable enough to earn our recommendation. Some of the speeches go on too long, especially when a good complaint is expected to explain everything wrong with modern life.
Jim Uhls’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel gives Edward Norton’s narrator the wit to make self-pity entertaining. Norton is excellent at letting resentment sound reasonable, then allowing just enough petulance into the delivery to make us question the complaint. He makes it easy to imagine how exhausting the man would be in ordinary company, even while we enjoy listening. The writing is funniest when that selfishness remains visible, before anyone starts treating discontent as a qualification for leadership.
Brad Pitt gives Tyler the confidence that Norton so conspicuously lacks, and the casting does a good deal of the film’s work. We found Tyler alarmingly easy to like. Pitt’s easy, amused delivery makes his contempt sound like an invitation to join in. The discomfort comes from recognising how readily that charm excuses what he says. Fincher allows the attraction enough time that dismissing everyone who responds to it would feel dishonest.
Jeff Cronenweth’s cinematography makes the violence difficult to enjoy at a safe distance, keeping our attention on the bodies absorbing it. Alex McDowell’s production design supplies ugliness that is perversely inviting; Fincher’s men seem to have made an aesthetic preference out of their dissatisfaction. James Haygood’s editing finds the abrupt change from amusement to aggression, and the speed helps the jokes sting. John King and Michael Simpson’s music keeps the pressure on, sometimes insistently enough to make us wish it would leave a scene alone.
Helena Bonham Carter’s Marla Singer is essential because she makes the business of dealing with another person feel troublesome again. Bonham Carter brings a welcome impatience to the film, suggesting how tedious all this male certainty might look to somebody outside it. The relationship between Marla and the narrator offers a reason to care when the larger provocations start repeating themselves. We wanted more of that awkwardness, particularly when the film seemed satisfied merely to have found another way of being offensive.
The weakness is how long we are expected to listen to the complaints. Uhls gives these men plenty of things to resent, but also lets them sound pleased with their own cleverness for too long. At 139 minutes, the film gives us time to notice the repetition, especially once Tyler’s confidence has become familiar. Among films about violent male rebellion, its willingness to make that rebellion ridiculous is a considerable strength. Fincher could trust the ridicule more often and shorten the lectures.
The 18 certificate is a useful warning, though the humour may catch us less prepared than the violence. This is an evening for company willing to disagree about what they have just watched. Be suspicious if everyone leaves admiring Tyler for the same reasons.
