1999 / 139 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

I am Jack’s vast sense of disappointment.

There are a lot of people who will tell you that this is an excellent movie, perhaps even the best movie of the year. First off, I must say that I REALLY disagree with them. Second of all, I must say that I envy those who were able to enjoy this film because I wasn’t one of them and I sorely wanted to be.

The film has an excellent first hour and, had it not strayed from this, it would probably have been up for a couple awards on Oscar Sunday. It begins with a very depressed young man, played to acute perfection by the enormously talented Edward Norton, who cannot sleep. Worse than that, he cannot feel. He goes through life like a dissatisfied drone. He has everything that the magazines say he should have to be happy, yet he has no emotions whatsoever. He goes through life in a state of numbness.

Then, one day, he starts going to therapy sessions for diseases he does not have. Here he begins to feel pain, shame, horror, infinite sadness, all the bad things in life… but the very fact that he is feeling fills him with glee. He becomes addicted to support groups and goes to them the way an addict uses their drug of choice. This portion of the film is a delightful bit of satiric comedy that I was very fond of. It’s the sort of daring, brilliant dark comedy that we just don’t see anymore these days.

But then Ed meets a character played by Brad Pitt. I did not love or hate Brad’s performance. It sort of just hangs there. With Brad, Ed starts “Fight Club”. This is, ironically, the weakest stuff in the film. The movie never reallly reveals what the point of fight club is. Maybe that is its point, okay, cool. But.. it just didn’t work for me. It didn’t work half as well as the support group stuff had. It struck me as quite stupid, really.

From there, the film just seems to unravel. So does Edward’s life. He discovers something about himself, a plot twist that made me groan. By the end, the film seems to be trying to pass itself off as some sort of poor man’s answer to “The Sixth Sense”. I guess the ending all makes sense, but I didn’t feel it was needed. It felt like the filmmakers were not secure enough in their story to trust it and instead felt the need to throw in some tricks.

Maybe it’s one of those films that I will appreciate more on a further viewing and, I must say, I am sorta interested in seeing it again. But on my first experience, I was left a bit disappointed. I loved many aspects of the movie, even after it started to careen out of control, but I was ultimately left cold by it.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 15th, 1999 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.