Let's get ready to rumble

Fight Club (18)

MID-WAY into Fight Club, a frighteningly menacing Brad Pitt says: "The first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club." His audience is a group of otherwise ordinary men, normal, everyday Joes who meet regularly in the basement of a seedy bar simply for the pleasure of beating the hell out of one another.

A secret society dedicated to part-time pugilists, an underground organisation where men get in touch with their inner id by hammering their fellow members to within an inch of their lives, this is the Fight Club Pitt is so keen to keep quiet about.

Luckily, Pitt slapped no such injuction on discussing the film. Crammed full of ideas, manicly paced and boasting stunning performances from Pitt and Ed Norton, Fight Club is a film which it's impossible not to talk about.

Norton is the unnamed hero, an anonymous white-collar cog in an anonymous corporate machine (he works in insurance or something) who can't sleep at night. He has a full and complete lifestyle (at one point, his gorgeous flat transforms into a walk-in Ikea catalogue, price tags and everything) but an empty, thankless life.

Norton attends a support group for testicular cancer sufferers in order to discover what suffering really means. But what Norton actually finds is salvation: among the company of terminal patients and grief-striken survivors, Norton is at last able to relax, finally able to sleep at night.

Instantly, he stops being a slave to consumerism and becomes instead a group-therapy junkie. All this is brilliantly done. A little sick, a touch unsettling, but darkly funny, too.

Whizzing through these scenes with real panache, director David Fincher shows an instinct for comedy largely lacking in his last hit, the millennial gloom-fest Seven. Norton's wonderfully dry unemotive voiceover is worth the price of a ticket alone. But if the idea of a big-budget Hollywood movie about an anonymous guy selfishly finding solace in the suffering of others strikes you as odd, it's got nothing on the rest of the film.

On an overnight flight, Norton meets Tyler Durden (Pitt), who takes Norton under his wing. Part soap salesman, part bare-knuckle fighter (it's Tyler who inaugurates Fight Club), and part urban terrorist, Tyler becomes some kind of anarchic, anti-consumerist elder brother to Norton as well as a father figure to the men who join Fight Club.

Fincher doesn't pull his punches in the fight sequences. These visceral, violent scenes held the film up with the American censor and had its critics over here too. You can see why. Like the boxing scenes in Raging Bull, Fincher's fights give off an aesthetic thrill which makes the brutality strangely alluring. As copycat Fight Clubs spring up around the US, there are vaguely fascistic overtones to the way Tyler turns this clandestine organisation into a network of military units, dedicated to blowing up selected head-offices of big corporations.

Fight Club is as anarchic as Tyler. There's its tale-twisting final 15 minutes, for instance, which gleefully overturns every scriptwriting rule in the book. Then there's Fincher's dizzying visual style, beefed up by the latest digital tenchnologies. His camera defies gravity - check out the vertiginous single-shot drop from a skyscraper into an underground car park - but it just as easily passes through Norton's head to show the workings of his brain.

But for all its rule-breaking, Fight Club is never quite as subversive as the controversy it generated suggests. It is simply hugely inventive entertainment, which is more than enough to talk to about these days.

Edward Lawrenson

Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.