Nice to see you again, fans of the cinema! This is the Face-Off, where two movies enter and both movies leave, but one leaves in a slightly better light. Yes, here we take two competitors and compare their key elements and see who comes out the champion. It's a fierce competition that results in blood, tears, and online arguments, but the more brutal the battle, the sweeter the victory.
This last weekend saw the latest of Brad Pitt's critically acclaimed work hitting the big screen, AD ASTRA, which should inspire anyone to want to look back on some of the actor's most notable outings. You can go to his heartthrob outings, like LEGENDS OF THE FALL, INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, and even THE MEXICAN, if you please, or you can go to his more subdued work, like CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, MONEYBALL or THE BIG SHORT. But this week I want to go back to two of his most beloved films, and the roles that proved he was capable of far more than just having perfect looks. For this, we go to his first films with director David Fincher, which took his down some dark paths and brought out excellent work at the end: It's SEVEN vs. FIGHT CLUB.
In the first, he plays a detective trying to hunt down a sinister criminal, and in the second he's a charming soap salesman with grand plans for global chaos — each showing off a different layer of his talents. But this isn't just about Pitt, as I will be breaking down several key aspects of these acclaimed movies, and in the end, only one can win the Pitt Bash.
Brad Pitt as David Mills
Morgan Freeman as William Somerset
Gwyneth Paltrow as Tracy Mills
R. Lee Ermey as Captain
Richard Roundtree as D.A. Martin Talbot
John C. McGinley as California
and Kevin Spacey as John Doe
Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden
Edward Norton as The Narrator
Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer
Meat Loaf as Robert Paulson
Jared Leto as Angel Face
Zach Grenier as Richard Chesler
Holt McCallany as The Mechanic
Audiences didn’t quite get to see what David Fincher was capable of with his first major movie, ALIEN 3, so luckily, he got another shot with SEVEN a few years later. Even with movies like THE SOCIAL NETWORK and ZODIAC in his filmography, SEVEN is arguably the best exemplification of Fincher as a filmmaker, with all the qualities that make him a master on full display. For starters, there’s his incredible attention to detail, with not a shot wasted or important piece of information gone to waste, all of which makes you feel like you’re watching a real true-crime saga unfold in front of your very eyes. Like he would later do with ZODIAC, he makes the investigation and police work more fascinating than the blood and gore, and all in a New York City that is constantly soaking in rain and seems to be falling apart. The real story isn’t the kills and killer, but how these men hunt him down and confront the grim, senseless nature of a violent world, and Fincher proves he is one of the few filmmakers around who can make such dark, weighty material so compelling. Working with editor Richard Francis-Bruce, Fincher balances this bleak tone with a mystery that never makes you feel a step ahead of the detectives, showing just enough violence to drive the viciousness home, but keeping enough of a distance to make you more curious than repulsed (although repulsion is certainly in the cards). As new layers are peeled back the descent into madness and the crimes become increasingly absorbing, so by the end Fincher has you fullly on board, and when we meet a villain who is genuinely smart and fleshed out, there’s still an element of surprise left on the table, leading to what is perhaps one of the most excellently-crafted movie endings of all time. Fincher has made some amazing movies in the 24 years since SEVEN, but every time I rewatch it I’m reminded of just how perfect his work is here, with nothing feeling wasted or overblown, the tone perfectly balanced and getting the most out of every frame.
When looking at the titles in Fincher’s filmography, FIGHT CLUB is certainly the black sheep (Okay, maybe BENJAMIN BUTTON). Not that it doesn’t have his trademarks, like an attention to detail that makes each viewing feel like a richer experience, but, truly, this is the film where he leaped in with a “F**k it all” attitude and gave the movie the same edgy, visceral, unique spirit. Honing a visual style after working on SEVEN and THE GAME, FIGHT CLUB found Fincher experimenting with new styles that clashed and juxtaposed one another. In working with cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, Fincher reflected the manic psychological state of Norton’s Narrator by placing him within a box of mundane superficiality, making early scenes look bland and hollow (with splices of Durden popping in), all before switching things up to look bolder and sleekier once Durden arrives, featuring a lot of saturated colors and intricate lighting. The story itself can seem aimless at times as we live in a constant stream of anti-establishment philosophizing, which can come off as both cool and, by today’s standards, exhausting to drudge through, but Fincher deserves praise for at least making it all look compelling. The staging of Durden and Narrator in of itself commands attention once you know the ending, with Durden placed and filmed in ways that ensure he’s always seen as a manifestation of Narrator and not an actual person. Whether you love it or hate it there’s a lot to unpack in FIGHT CLUB, but at the end of the day Fincher proved he understood the material beyond the rhetoric and hyper-masculinity, finding what he’s talked about as the “coming-of-age” nature of the film, wherein Narrator breaks from the confinements he believes he was supposed to build his life around, only to destroy both those barriers and the new ones he manifests in order to become a whole person on the other side. It may not be my favorite of his, but it is certainly his most unique piece of work, and he brought the movie to life in intelligent, brutal ways no one else really could’ve.
The script from writer Andrew Kevin Walker deserves as much praise as Fincher’s direction, with Walker centering the story not on uber-violent killings and rather on police work that makes for a compelling mystery story. At the heart of his movie Walker focuses on two very different detectives, William Somerset and David Mills, the former being serious, methodical, desensitized and tired of the senselessness in the world around him. This clashes perfectly with the more hot-headed Mills, who isn’t that far above other cops who are quick to label killers like Doe as nut jobs and go into scenarios with a bit of thick-headedness. But they’re both passionate in different ways, and Walker puts a bit of a spin on the buddy cop angle that was prevalent of the era as the two have a clash of ideologies that gives the movie its complexity: How do we respond to a world that has seemingly lost its way? With hope? Detachment? Rage? With the occasional crass joke about semen? That approach makes SEVEN far smarter than most cop movies have any right to be – especially during an era when cop movies were at their most popular – and in it are a series of richly layered characters, working through a mystery that's endlessly fascinating and soaking in dread.
As I said above, there’s a lot to unpack in FIGHT CLUB. Based on the book by Chuck Palahniuk, writer Jim Uhls gets sole screenwriting credit, even though Fincher had a heavy hand in the script, as did Norton and Pitt, with some outside assistance from Andrew Kevin Walker and even Cameron Crowe. What comes out is a script that’s darkly funny and satirical and places the Narrator in a story that confronts the then-prevalent (and maybe still is today) concepts of identity in an increasingly consumer-based culture. It’s a fascinating concept for the book that leaps onto the page, and Tyler, Narrator, and Marla feel fleshed out, with the former having a cool-as-hell ambiguity about him and the latter two having a clashing, alluring emotional foundation. There’s a lot to love about the script in how it brings the book to the page, but it also suffers from a rather slogging second act, dragging to a bloated 140-minute runtime. Not to say that the build-up of Tyler and Narrator’s dynamic isn’t necessary, it’s just that it’s plagued by endless rantings about the bullshittery of the modern world, aimed to appeal to the angriest and fed up of audiences. Yeah, lines like “The things you own end up owning you,” roll-off Pitt’s silver tongue, but have the intellectual prowess of a high schooler trying to sound philosophical by regurgitating something he read online. On a script level, the movie lives in its own “F**k you, f**k everything” way of thinking so deeply that it makes the story seem aimless. It’s a movie that’s smart in execution but not as smart as it thinks it is on a storytelling front, and between an absorbing, funny first act and a third act where there is some actual conflict, both internal and external, is a script that knows what the movie is but not what to do with itself.
Bits:
Somerset and Mills
Gluttony
Greed
Discovering the Sins
The Library
Friendly Dinner
Help Me
The Raid
Sloth
Tracy and Somerset
Apartment Shootout
Doe's Apartment
Lust
John Doe Arrives
What's in the Box?!
Becoming Wrath
Lines:
Mills: “What's in the box?!”
—–
Somerset: “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” I agree with the second part.”
—–
Doe: “Wanting people to listen, you can't just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you'll notice you've got their strict attention.”
—–
Doe: “We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it's common, it's trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not anymore. I'm setting the example. What I've done is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed… forever.”
—–
Doe: “I visited your home this morning after you'd left. I tried to play husband. I tried to taste the life of a simple man. It didn't work out, so I took a souvenir… her pretty head.”
—–
Somerset: “David. If you kill him, he will win.”
—–
Mills: “What do you got?”
Somerset: “Dead dog.”
Doe: “I didn't do that.”
—–
Mills: “He's a nut-bag! Just because the fucker's got a library card doesn't make him Yoda!”
—–
Somerset: “If we catch John Doe and he turns out to be the devil, I mean if he's Satan himself, that might live up to our expectations, but he's not the devil. He's just a man.”
—–
Mills: “You're no messiah. You're a movie of the week. You're a fucking t-shirt, at best.”
—–
Doe: “Detective. Detective. DETECTIVE! I believe you're looking for me.”
—–
Mills: “C'mon, he's insane. Look. Right now he's probably dancing around in his grandma's panties, yeah, rubbing himself in peanut butter.”
—–
Somerset: “On the subway today, a man came up to me to start a conversation. He made small talk, a lonely man talking about the weather and other things. I tried to be pleasant and accommodating, but my head hurt from his banality. I almost didn't notice it had happened, but I suddenly threw up all over him. He was not pleased, and I couldn't stop laughing.”
Bits:
Starting at the Beginning
Catalog Shopping
Therapy Sessions
Meeting Marla
Airplane Crash
Tyler Durden
Hit Me
Durden's Life
Fight Club
Marla Stays Over
Laughing and Bleeding
Burning Hand
Poltical Intimidation
Angel Face's Face
Robert Paulson
The Real Durden
Durden v. Durden
Blowing it all to Hell
Lines:
Tyler: “Gentlemen, welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club!”
—–
Tyler: “The things you own end up owning you.”
—–
Tyler: “It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.”
—–
Marla: “My God. I haven't been fucked like that since grade school.”
—–
Narrator: “I wanted to destroy something beautiful.”
—–
Tyler: “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”
—–
Tyler: “Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”
—–
Tyler: “You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”
—–
Narrator: “You met me at a very strange time in my life”
—–
Narrator: “Tyler sold his soap to department stores at $20 a bar. Lord knows what they charged. It was beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them.”
—–
Tyler: “You know why they put oxygen masks on planes?
Narrator: “So you can breathe.”
Tyler: “Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you're taking giant panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It's all right here. Emergency water landing – 600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.”
—–
Tyler: “We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.”
—–
Narrator: “I am Jack's inflamed sense of rejection.”
—–
Narrator: “I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”
—–
Tyler: “Now, a question of etiquette – as I pass, do I give you the ass or the crotch?”
—–
Tyler: Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Ok, you are now firing a gun at your 'imaginary friend' near 400 gallons of nitroglycerine!
At the time this came out Pitt was a rising star touted for his good looks and as a heartthrob of sorts in movies like RIVER RUNS THROUGH, LEGENDS OF THE FALL and INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE. What he does in SEVEN is tears down that entire persona and opens himself up to darker, more flawed terrain, where his Mills seems like a bad compared to Somerset’s studiousness. He’s brash, cocky, a little goofy, a little hot-headed and headed straight towards having his world rocked forever. It was the perfect role for him to take at that time (as was his work in 12 MONKEYS that year), and he does a great job representing the flip side of the coin to Freeman, who is calm and measured. Those final moments are some of the best he’s ever put out, descending from disbelief into anger and then into an emotionless depth, all in the span of a few minutes. This performance marked a big shift in the roles he could be seen in, and it would lead him to what we will tackle next.
With FIGHT CLUB Brad Pitt proved he was a different kind of leading man, one who is far more complex than audiences probably assumed and who had no problem tarnishing the image the media made of him for the sake of a project he believed in. Here he’s charming and commanding and slick as hell as Durden – and is truly the perfect embodiment of the man many men wish they could be. But Pitt works in underneath the superficial layers a mischievous ambiguity, where he spouts all sorts of anti-everything musings, but whom you have no idea what he’ll do next. When he gets into it his performance is wild and uninhibited, mixing the charm with an abundance of pure craziness that makes him compelling from start to finish. Even after 20 years, it remains some of his best work, and the kind we may not get to see from his again.
Remember that scene in the movie FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL when Jason Segel’s character is told to just do his “dark and ominous” stuff for that show? Those words always come to my mind now whenever I hear Howard Shore’s score for SEVEN. That’s by no means an insult; as far as dark and ominous goes, Shore’s score is the cream of the crop. The entire score has this eerie, malicious sound to it that plays whether it’s during a murder scene or a scene in the police station (although there is some Johann Bach to break it up during Freeman’s time at the library). The consistency of those seedy sounds ensures SEVEN always has that feeling on inescapable dread, but within that style, he works in some music fit for a noir thriller, heard best in the track “John Doe,” which plays and has a bit of energy during the apartment shootout. Shore also hits the perfect note by ending things with his “Wrath” piece, incorporating that suspenseful sound with emotional thuds, just as the shock is sinking in. Shore composed a great score for SEVEN, and even if there isn’t much variety to it, it keeps the clouds of dread hanging above every scene without fail.
Nowadays you’ll hear all sorts of electronic, digital-heavy scores in movies, and Fincher himself has leaned heavily into the style for movies like THE SOCIAL NETWORK. In FIGHT CLUB the electronic score from The Dust Brothers is used in ways the style never had been, especially for a major movie, and it has a dizzying, chaotic effect. Like the movie itself there’s a psychological nature to the Brothers’ score, wherein you never know what to expect with each piece of music: Sometimes there’s a slick funk to them that could’ve easily formed the basis for the OCEAN’S 11 score (“Homework”), while the track right after that (“What is Fight Club?”) is more hypnotic and even sensual at times. The synthetic beats are wild, menacing and pulsating, emphasizing the ecstatic nature of the whole movie. It’s as unique a score as you’re likely to hear, and compared to the heavy work from Shore, which is trying to target to spine, The Dust Brothers’ score is electric and constantly changing, targeting every firing neuron in your brain. For a movie like FIGHT CLUB, there is no other kind of music that would’ve worked better.
Awards:
Oscars:
Nominee
**Another 26 Wins & 38 Nominations per IMDb**
Praise:
Rotten Tomatoes: 81% (95% Audience Score)
Metacritic: 65 (8.9 Audience)
IMDb: 8.6 (Top Rated Movie #20)
$100 million ($327 million globally)
Awards:
Oscars:
Nominee
**Another 10 Wins & 37 Nominations per IMDb**
Praise:
Rotten Tomatoes: 79% (96% Audience Score)
Metacritic: 66 (9.0 Audience)
IMDb: 8.8 (Top Rated Movie #10)
$37 million ($100 million globally)
One of the things I love most about SEVEN is how it wastes no time at all getting to the nitty-gritty of Fincher’s New York, showcasing the seedy, dilapidated buildings being pelted in rain. There is a constant sense of danger from the first scene, as Somerset investigates a random crime scene, and then jumping right into the first sin, an obese man tied up and forced to eat spaghetti until he died. It’s gruesome and chilling, with crime scenes getting progressively more vicious and the mystery becoming increasingly tense. Speaking to the suspense, what makes it so palpable and fascinating is the exploration of the mythology and religious iconography – both naturally creepy things – and how they are worked into all the crimes. There’s a sadistic nature to it that never lets up, and we’re firmly placed in the lead character’s shoes as they find no leads, and no suspects, only having to suffer the event of another killing and wonder what it all means. Here, Fincher found a way to the mystery compelling by keeping so much in the dark, while showing just enough emphasize the brutality of it all – which also has the added benefit of satisfying the ol’ blood lust. And must I even talk about that ending? Pure genius on every level.
By its title alone, audiences can expect a bountiful dose of violence throughout FIGHT CLUB. The fights are raw and striking, with the sweaty fists mashing against sweaty faces and bodies, exuding uber-masculinity in the process (and much praise goes to the sound department). These fights are truly brutal, the wet sound of blood and bone hitting the floor, and dark red blood pouring out of every orifice. Even by today’s standards, it would be pretty hard to watch at points, but it does the job of loosening the movie up, just as it gives the participants a sense of freedom and chaos. To go with the violence there are some heavy psychological thriller elements, mostly in the third act, wherein Narrator must come to terms with his mental instability and the manifestation of Durden. It’s a little wonky a twist, but it does make one reflect on the movie as a whole and analyze how the creation of Durden in Narrator’s mind mirrors his journey and growth. Even if that doesn’t do it for you, the bounty of slick violence more than compensates.
FIGHT CLUB was misunderstood by many when it came out but has since become the cult classic to end all cult classics. This is for good reason, as there's genuinely a lot to admire about what David Fincher created, with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton adding so much as well. Fincher is working at a level hasn't since, and the movie hasn't lost its edge even 20 years later. Still, it's not a perfect movie and suffers from script issues that certainly prove it isn't always as smart as it thinks it is. And minus the violence, it really only has the direction of Fincher and the performances to keep it afloat (and a great piece of music, too). On the other end, we have SEVEN, which upon every rewatch I am comfortable labeling it as a perfect movie. Nothing is wasted and everything is compelling, from the character work to Fincher's direction, with enough thrills and gore to keep everything engaging but never indulgent. It's a crime story masterpiece on every level, and the fact it became a blockbuster in spite of the heavy material and remains a classic to this day is a testament to how perfectly crafted a film it is. Never where there be a world where someone doesn't scream "What's in the box?!" any time any sort of box is nearby.