Their Best Role: Brad Pitt and 'Fight Club'
Filed under: Fandom
Welcome to a new series here on Cinematical where we select an actor or actress and the role we think is their all time best.
Brad Pitt has taken on a myriad of roles over the years. He's fly fished, hunted down sadistic killers, played a romantic devil, dallied in thievery, suffered through pain in his Achilles, and even showed up as the notorious Jesse James. And while he may have earned Oscar nominations for his turn as a mental patient in 12 Monkeys and a backward-aging man in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, his best role lives in cult fandom as the corporation-loathing anarchist Tyler Durden in Fight Club.
I know. It's strange of me to pick this role out of the list -- especially in light of his time in 12 Monkeys. Fight Club was the film Edward Norton got recognized for -- not so much Brad Pitt. But it's Durden that always stuck out to me -- a marked turning point in Pitt's career.
From the very beginning, Pitt's work was rife with reinvention. He started as the clean-cut and cute young actor, from uncredited time as a preppy partygoer in Less Than Zero to shilling Pringles in bubbly '80s commercials. Then his hair grew out a little and he played the seductive J.D. in Thelma & Louise, ushering in a period of grunge and long-haired loverdom. He dated Juliette Lewis, played a trashy ex-con in Kalifornia, and made a name for himself as a rugged heartthrob, balancing vampiric times with Tom Cruise in dramatic period pieces. However, just when the path seemed set, the year 1995 rang in with the back-to-back power of Se7en and Twelve Monkeys. Things were starting to change.
But they really snapped with Fight Club. Having proven himself over an 8-year span, the light turned on. Slight aspects of all his previous and future roles spiraled into one seemingly unstoppable man. Gone was the actor skirting on the edge of stardom. While the adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel was an epic film of all things cult rather than a mainstream wonder, Pitt's career was never the same. Soon came the likes of being Julia Roberts' leading man, a Spy Game, and a lead in the celeb-fest known as Ocean's Eleven. Goodbye, man skirting the edges of true superstardom, hello epic starring roles and a romantic life squarely in the public eye.But back to Tyler Durden. Superficially, he was the man who made even a shirt covered in maple leaves look cool, intermingling questionable wardrobes and ridiculousness with toughness, insanity, and a chiseled powerhouse of a body. Pitt danced between the most ridiculous whimsy from musing about fighting Hemingway to being the unstoppable force of anti-establishment anger. He was the vehicle for The Narrator's release of pent up aggression, confusion, and personality. Durden swam in and out of these extremes, always seeming perfectly at home and always making them seem perfectly sensible, even if they were utterly crazy. Purely natural chaos that builds from a blip of a release to uncontrollable mayhem.
It's not hard to imagine other people playing Jeffrey Goines or Benjamin Button, the performances being solid while also the sort of fare that many men could take on. But Tyler Durden was, and will always be, Brad Pitt. There's no one who could have pulled it off with the same magic and fervor.
Agree? Think I'm crazy? Weigh in below.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
11-12-2009 @ 12:24PM
thirdmanphilip said...
This movie sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11
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11-12-2009 @ 12:26PM
Amani said...
I like this idea for a series. Good work. And very good point about Pitt. I still prefer his role in Se7en but Fight Club is damn good too.
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11-12-2009 @ 12:38PM
replayray said...
yep, you're right. i checked his filmography, it's not even close.best role? "Fight Club", by a knockout.
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11-12-2009 @ 1:15PM
MYMHM said...
He'll always be "Floyd - Dick's Roommate" to me...
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11-12-2009 @ 1:48PM
Sofia said...
Fight Club is the best movie ever made!
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11-12-2009 @ 1:37PM
Jill Usrey said...
I like this new series. I completely agree that Tyler Durden is, by far, Brad Pitt's best role. I have never thought that Brad Pitt was very attractive, but he fascinate's me as an actor, because of the roles he picks. Sometimes he nails the part (Mickey the Pikey in Snatch), sometimes he's wooden (Benjamin Buttons), but he always picks these unconventional roles that you don't typically see Hollywood Leads doing. And that will always get my respect for his work. Good job!
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11-12-2009 @ 1:55PM
mdisloki said...
I agree completely that Tyler Durden is Brad Pitt's best role.
Daniel Day-Lewis is a great candidate for this column.
Starting in 1989 he had;
My Left Foot
The Last of the Mohicans
The Age of Innocence
The Crucible
The Boxer
Gangs of New York
There Will be Blood
If you were to do a plus 1/ minus 1 system to examine an actor's carreer. Plus 1 for good roles and minus 1 for bad roles. Lewis could be near the top of the heap.
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11-12-2009 @ 2:04PM
John Ramistella said...
I like this idea for an article. Hopefully you won't get yelled at.
I'm a little biased because I really don't like Fight Club, but I remember feeling like his role in Snatch was a lot more of a statement role. Several actors would have jumped at the chance to be the embodiment of machismo, and probably would have done a serviceable job with it. But for Pitt to immerse himself into the role of an unintelligible fighting gypsy, that's when I gained a new respect for him.
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11-12-2009 @ 2:51PM
Angie said...
I don't think anyone else could have played Tyler Durden, so even if its not his best role, he was certainly the absolute best for the part. Given that Tyler is supposed to idealized, and Pitt was the "sexiest man alive" around that time, it was just perfect. Personally I would have a hard time between this and Se7en to choose which was his best. But I do think this was the first time when he went from "that guy other women seem to drool over" to "a great actor" in my eyes.
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11-12-2009 @ 2:54PM
Andy said...
(Totally cool idea for a series)
I would tend to agree that this is his iconic role...well, to date.
To be able to balance turning on the ladies, and being cool to the guys...very hard to do. But when you can do that, you're golden. Think Indiana Jones, and roles like that.
It's been a pretty awesome career really, especially when frankly, he's often not that great. When playing cool and collected, he's generally just fine. But when a script calls for something more, it can get cringe inducing. I recently rewatched 'Interview with The Vampire', and I was a little surprised as to how bad he was.
But overall I'm often happy to see him, and can always respect him for seeking out roles like 'Inglorious Basterds', '12 Monkeys', and 'True Romance'.
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11-12-2009 @ 2:57PM
justin said...
i've never cared much for Pitt as an actor, but much like Keanu, he's managed to find his way into several films that i enjoy, to varying degrees.
Fight Club, however, isn't one of them.
i hate the ending. you can't use violence as a shaping tool for the entire film and then eradicate the wielder of said tool by turning the violence against him. yes, anarchy is one of film's roots, but this goes beyond irony and into idiocy, regardless of if you subscribe to the violence being theoretically symbolic.
not drinking the kool-aid on that one. sorry.
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11-12-2009 @ 3:55PM
Matt Watkins said...
ditto on Snatch...
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11-12-2009 @ 5:45PM
Dee said...
Even if the film itself is flawed, Kalifornia is the movie that convinced me that Brad Pitt was incredibly talented. He's virtually inrecognizable in that film. Add me to the list of people that were left unimpressed by Fight Club.
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11-12-2009 @ 8:10PM
WilliamJG said...
what about phil s hoffman he is amazing in everything
i can't choose his best
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11-12-2009 @ 9:33PM
Kate Sim said...
I concur. Tyler Durden has to be Pitt's best role. Unforgettable...
I really like this topic. Suggestions:
Benicio del Toro
Christian Slater
Winona Ryder
Al Pacino
Andy Garcia
Russell Crowe
Patrick Swayze
Sean Penn
Kate Winslet
George Clooney
Marlon Brando
Audrey Hepburn
Cate Blanchett
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11-13-2009 @ 11:25PM
pra said...
I think brad pitt has done very much odd type films. out of them few are good ones.
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11-13-2009 @ 8:19AM
Mangorilla said...
Um, clearly you've never seen The Mexican. Hands down Brad's best role. (I kid, I kid...)
I agree with you completely on this one. Until Fight Club, Brad Pitt didn't do much for me. And since Fight Club, he hasn't blown me away either. Fight Club was his magic moment. The Oceans movies are fun, but he's basically playing a watered down Tyler with less of the gritty anarchist tone and more of a crafty heist-man demeanor. His character seemed more like he should be a CEO of a snowboarding company than a world class theif, to me. He was amusing in Burn After Reading, but it was a bit too over the top goofy for me, instead of the witty, ironic and sarcastic humor of Tyler. Mr. and Mrs. Smith worked because of the natural chemistry between Brad and Angie, but the dune buggy scenes especially were a page right out of the Tyler handbook, and I again felt like asking why would this guy be a spy? He was like a little boy playing James Bond. Prior to Fight Club, I feel like he mostly played self aware pretty boy characters that maybe could charm the ladies that fell for it, but certainly couldn't incite a revolution. In Fight Club, he combined his pretty boy persona with the gritty anarchist attitude, and I really believed that he could sell soap to bored, past their prime housewives from 9-5 and lead a group of anarchists in a string of petty crimes for the rest of the night.
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11-14-2009 @ 1:34AM
Slappy said...
You're all wrong. Brad Pitt's best performance and a role he was born to play = Jesse James in The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford. Its exclusion from any of these comments saddens me and is a testament to how tremendously under-appreciated that film is and Pitt's phenomenal work in it is as well.
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1-04-2010 @ 8:29PM
Apexa Mamtora said...
A little late to this post but I agree wholeheartedly with this comment. Not only was The Assassination of Jesse James a brilliant film but it was the likes of Brad that really made the film great.
11-15-2009 @ 7:11PM
Ashweee said...
No offense to anyone but I think the ones who say Fight Club wasn't good completely missed the point, for once I can say I like the ending of the movie better than the book.
I never really cared for Brad Pitt until I watched Fight Club, now I am a HUGE Brad Pitt fan. Being the hot lead actor that he is he could choose any movie he wants but he tends to choose movies that have intelligence to them and I absolutely love that about him.
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