D.C. MOVIE GUYS

Fever Pitch
Directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly
Just making the roster nationwide beginning 4/8/2005
2.5 *
I saw this really great movie called Fever Pitch based on the autobiographical book by Nick Hornby. Ostensibly a romantic comedy, it is really about this guy’s obsession with his favorite professional sports team. Turns out that when he was a kid and going through a particularly tough time, he got taken to a game and fell in love with the whole scene. Now 20+ years later, he is a teacher, but he never misses a match with his favorite team and lives and dies with their ups and downs (mostly downs, he does not exactly root for the New York Yankees). However, the monkey wrench about to be tossed into his life is a new girl he has just met. He likes her (though she is a bit of a stick), but she just does not understand that a man must have priorities in life and she runs her own life in such a haphazard fashion that she actually makes plans without first checking the schedule. What can you do with a woman like that… but he does want to make this work.
Besides being a hilarious, well-told story with lots of laughs and a great performance in the lead role, the movie is also the greatest screen rendering I can recall about what it means to be a true fan of a sports team (or for that matter a person obsessed with something).
Unfortunately, the great movie named Fever Pitch is the original version featuring Colin Firth which was barely released in this country and not the newly-opened remake that replaces the charmingly droll Firth with the barely-talented Jimmy Fallon and changes Hornby’s beloved Arsenal football (first and last note of explanation, soccer here, football everywhere else on the planet) to the Boston Red Sox who made some modest headlines last October for winning their first World Series in 86 years.
The remake is simply a romantic comedy vehicle for Fallon and Drew Barrymore (so much better in 50 First Dates) and a modest mash note to the Red Sox from born and bred New Englanders Peter and Bobby Farrelly. Drew plays a big business high-flyer who meets math teacher Ben (Fallon). Despite her’s (and the movie’s) snobby concerns that a teacher might not be the right choice for this corporate carnivore, the two date and fall in love. But then spring rolls around and Ben’s true, long-time love for the Boston Red Sox reasserts itself. Drew’s Lindsey gamely struggles along attending a bunch of games (usually with her laptop along—what the nearby seated Fenway faithful derisively dismiss as her “homework”). But as the season wears on and the relationship is increasingly impacted by the Bosox hub-bub, the friction between the lovers increases (and not in a good way). Will Ben abandon his true love for the more socially-acceptable relationship?
But what was in its previous incarnation a greatly entertaining and thought-provoking meditation on the nature of sports fan-aticism is here reduced to simple-minded Hollywood junk. The biggest problem is Fallon. He is not the worst actor on the planet, but there are a lot of people who claim to be actors that I have yet to see. His marginally tedious and barely endurable presence on Saturday Night Live for a few minutes at a time could be endured (those in need of further proof should note how much the “Weekend Update” segment has improved by the substitution of Amy Poehler for Fallon), but as the sole focus of a feature film, he is interminable. Once the Red Sox were chosen as the object of affection, the obvious choice to star would have been Matt Damon. The Farrelly Brothers should have no more countenanced making the movie without him than anyone would have considered filming Gone With the Wind without Clark Gable. Damon, Ben Affleck or even Fallon’s former SNLer Seth Meyers would have had the virtue of being actual Red Sox fans as well as better actors than Fallon. All Fallon brings to the field is a waning notoriety of the sort Joe Piscopo once had.
Another problem with the movie is baseball itself. The equivalent of being a football fan in England is being a football fan in the United States (except our football is not dull, drab, and boring with major championships decided with some foot fetishist’s equivalent of batting practice). I might also point out that the real American equivalent to Hornby’s beloved Arsenal is the New York Jets in that our young hero becomes infected in his youth by an improbable championship and then spends decades rooting for a team whose results are mostly mediocre. Prior to last October, anybody old enough to remember the last Red Sox World Series win is too old to remember the last Red Sox World Series win. And baseball is just different than either footballs. Major league baseball is played every day. Your passion cannot burn white hot every day for six months unless you are a total loony (as opposed to the partial kind that describes most sports fans). Speaking as a lifelong New York Mets fan who watched his team blow a 9th inning two-run Opening Day lead, and open to their worst start in 40 years, the day-to-day vagaries of the game will drive you bonkers. A fan’s baseball season is not a sprint but a marathon. And much like the game itself, the fans virtues are patience and reserve and picking your moments.
The virtues of the new Fever Pitch are a gaggle of giggles and the too few moments when the movie rings true (such as the 10-year-old’s first glimpse of a major league field). But as for the rest, Fever Pitch makes about as successful a trans-Atlantic crossing as the Titanic did.
–Bill Henry

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