Fight Club Review - James Prell
Fight Club has a unique storytelling style that comes through in both the structure and the camera work. It is a hard hitting combination of bare knuckle brawling, an outcry against mindless consumerism, and a head-spinning example of the unreliable narrator. It is a beast of a film adapted from the book by Chuck Palahniuk with care and extreme attention to detail and directed by David Fincher, then brought to life by stellar performances from leads Edward Norton (narrator), Brad Pitt (Tyler Durden), and Helena Bonham Carter (Marla Singer). Fight Club is so chalked full of content that it is hard to take everything in during the first watch, and in fact much of the movie can only be appreciated the second time around. It is hard to summarize the movie into a sentence, but to make an effort: Fight Club is the story of a group of men who decide to stop slaving away at their crummy jobs in order to punch and kick each other —and the rest of the world— into enlightenment.
One of the most impressive aspects of Fight Club is the extreme attention given to the cinematography. There are no handheld shots in the film, and the resulting use of exclusively smooth panning and tracking shots serve to remind us the story is a narrative from one character’s point of view. Parts of the film are slowed down or in some cases damaged as if on a film reel to serve a similar purpose of showing particular moments of clarity, or blanks, in the narrator’s memory.
In a film all about perspective and comparisons, nothing drives the point home like the relationship between the narrator, Tyler, and Marla. The Narrator, sometimes known as Jack, begins as a cog in the machine. He works all day at a job he hates so that he can go home and buy IKEA furniture for his condo. His sheep-like personality lends a stark contrast to the militantly carefree force of nature that is Tyler Durden, whose jobs include making soap out of rendered fat stolen from liposuction clinics, urinating in soups and serving them to upper class customers in high end restaurants, and slicing in single frames of pornography onto the film reels of family pictures. The two polar opposite personalities of Tyler and Jack are complemented by the love interest of the film, Marla Singer, whose manic personality might be described as gleefully suicidal. It is a joy to watch these three dynamic characters bounce banter off of one another over the course of the film, but one of my personal favorite sequences in the movie comes when their established relationship is dropped on its head. You know something is off when a character played by Helena Bonham Carter, who at one point uses a suicide attempt to elicit sex, suddenly sounds like the voice of reason. (to Jack) “There are things about you that I like. You're smart, you're funny, you're... spectacular in bed... But you're intolerable! You have very serious emotional problems. Deep seated problems for which you should seek professional help.”
Fight Club has a unique storytelling style that comes through in both the structure and the camera work. It is a hard hitting combination of bare knuckle brawling, an outcry against mindless consumerism, and a head-spinning example of the unreliable narrator. It is a beast of a film adapted from the book by Chuck Palahniuk with care and extreme attention to detail and directed by David Fincher, then brought to life by stellar performances from leads Edward Norton (narrator), Brad Pitt (Tyler Durden), and Helena Bonham Carter (Marla Singer). Fight Club is so chalked full of content that it is hard to take everything in during the first watch, and in fact much of the movie can only be appreciated the second time around. It is hard to summarize the movie into a sentence, but to make an effort: Fight Club is the story of a group of men who decide to stop slaving away at their crummy jobs in order to punch and kick each other —and the rest of the world— into enlightenment.
One of the most impressive aspects of Fight Club is the extreme attention given to the cinematography. There are no handheld shots in the film, and the resulting use of exclusively smooth panning and tracking shots serve to remind us the story is a narrative from one character’s point of view. Parts of the film are slowed down or in some cases damaged as if on a film reel to serve a similar purpose of showing particular moments of clarity, or blanks, in the narrator’s memory.
In a film all about perspective and comparisons, nothing drives the point home like the relationship between the narrator, Tyler, and Marla. The Narrator, sometimes known as Jack, begins as a cog in the machine. He works all day at a job he hates so that he can go home and buy IKEA furniture for his condo. His sheep-like personality lends a stark contrast to the militantly carefree force of nature that is Tyler Durden, whose jobs include making soap out of rendered fat stolen from liposuction clinics, urinating in soups and serving them to upper class customers in high end restaurants, and slicing in single frames of pornography onto the film reels of family pictures. The two polar opposite personalities of Tyler and Jack are complemented by the love interest of the film, Marla Singer, whose manic personality might be described as gleefully suicidal. It is a joy to watch these three dynamic characters bounce banter off of one another over the course of the film, but one of my personal favorite sequences in the movie comes when their established relationship is dropped on its head. You know something is off when a character played by Helena Bonham Carter, who at one point uses a suicide attempt to elicit sex, suddenly sounds like the voice of reason. (to Jack) “There are things about you that I like. You're smart, you're funny, you're... spectacular in bed... But you're intolerable! You have very serious emotional problems. Deep seated problems for which you should seek professional help.”