Word: norton
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...bumped into Edward Norton on a street in New York City a few months ago. Like literally, bumped into him and barely noticed. Sauntering down Broadway, he isn't a particularly intimidating presence. Thinning dyed blond hair, skinny, really pale. He looks kind of like the slightly dorky, always perfect kid in high school who everybody loves. The kind of guy who couldn't hurt...
That, of course, is Norton's greatest feat as an actor. He's a juggernaut of emotional range and complexity with a porcelain visage. He'll kill flies, oh yes. And he'll also embarrass any actor onscreen with him who isn't as dexterous or willing to get their hands dirty. Norton, thank God, will probably never be in a movie like You've Got Mail because his intensity would just liquify all the fluff. He's like the Miranda Richardson of American cinema--too good for 99 percent of it, so we just wait patiently until he finds...
...Fight Club, Norton sinks his teeth into every single scene and draws blood each time. Ironically, he's the fly this time--hurling himself against walls, spattering blood in a beautiful pattern, and then prying himself off for one last burst of energy. It's an unbelievable performance and a shattering portrayal of a character fatally immersed in his own psychoanalysis. He's the reason to see the movie...
...your answer to that question is, "Are you kidding?" then Fight Club is not for you, though it must be said that early on, it funnily realizes the satirical possibilities of 12-stepping your way through life. The film remains strong when Edward Norton's Narrator meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on an airplane. He's everything Norton isn't--a bruising truth teller with a taste for urban anarchism. He's the kind of guy who splices pornographic flash cuts into family movies when he works as a projectionist, who pees in the soup when he works...
...blow up all the credit-card companies and, just for good measure, TRW. It is along about here that Fight Club, which is Jim Uhls' adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel, lurches from satire into fantasy. For we begin to realize that the hunky Pitt is the willowy Norton's doppelganger, a projection of fantasies about masculine mastery...