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The American version of Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s bestselling 1992 memoir about his passion for London’s Arsenal soccer club, retains only the title and the obsession from the original. And a few trenchant insights, like Hornby’s thoughts on the "clarity" of soccer. Hornby’s surrogate in the film, Ben Wrightman (Jimmy Fallon), a math teacher at East Boston High, echoes them when he explains the elegant honesty of both his subject and his favorite sport. You can’t fake it in math or baseball, he says, the way you can in art or literature or other endeavors. If you don’t get it right, it’s there for all to see. Comedy also stands or falls on its own; if it’s funny, people laugh. Fever Pitch, the only film besides the forgettable Osmosis Jones the Farrelly Brothers have directed that they didn’t write, doesn’t get the laughs of Kingpin or even Stuck on You. A few gags, mostly with women getting hit in the head with various sports objects, draw on the Farrelly brand of crude, tasteless, gut-busting humor. The rest of the film enters the more amorphous arena of "romantic" comedy, a love story where the focus is on sweeter, more subjective sentiments. Subjective because the success of a romantic comedy depends on the lovability of the love interest. One of the love interests in Fever Pitch is Drew Barrymore. Lindsay’s workaholic career woman poses a class conflict with Ben’s blue-collar Sox fanatic. She admires his two-decade-long commitment to a losing cause, and despite an apartment that "looks like a gift shop" and a wardrobe that doesn’t come from "a man’s closet," she doesn’t at first see it as a conflict with his commitment to her. But she also grows to love his bumbling, childlike sense of humor. Fallon gets a bad rap from those who see him as one of the worst of recent SNL alumni, but I’ve always liked his recurring role as the Fenway Bleacher bum often paired with Matt Damon. He doesn’t draw on this persona in Fever (no Boston accent, which he does well), but the character he creates transcends caricature and is indeed sympathetic, amusing, and lovable. For his part, Ben is drawn to Lindsay because he’s challenged to score with someone out of his league — perhaps it’s the Red Sox inferiority complex talking. Then he finds her, as should the audience, more than just a trophy babe. Following a meet-cute first date in which he nurses her back to health after a bout of food poisoning (the Farrelly touches of disgusting sound effects, bodily excretions, and a small dog provide the right note of crude, comic intimacy), he begins to notice that she, too, is funny, flawed, smart, and "lyrical." In short, she’s Drew Barrymore. He says he could kill himself because of the adorable way she sometimes talks out of the side of her mouth. Who wouldn’t? But then there’s the other love story, one that Red Sox fans and all those who have committed themselves to a consuming Sisyphean obsession will recognize. This malady is the heart of Hornby’s book, and he ruefully acknowledges that such manias, like similar disorders in his subsequent novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, are symptomatic of a refusal to grow up. It’s also a key to the Farrelly Brothers’ movies, and as Sox fans themselves, they bring insider pathos and absurdity to the pain. They fashion convincing groups of fellow sufferers for Ben to share that pain with, including the equally freaky pals who each year gather to divvy up the pair of season tickets willed to him by his uncle (Lenny Clarke in a redolent cameo) and the clique of fans who populate his section in the box seats (one of them Jessamy Finet from the 2003-season documentary Still We Believe). They provide funky local color and also fill Lindsay in on the Curse of the Bambino, Bucky Dent, and Bill Buckner. After the past season, she must be the last person in America who’s not familiar with them. The Farrellys got to shoot their love story where and when it was consummated — at Fenway Park last season. Romantic comedies are about impossible dreams, the wedding of desires in conflict with reality and in conflict with themselves. Maybe the Farrellys’ greatest achievement is the way the World Series win complements rather than overshadows the hill of beans of their protagonists. For cinematic images of romantic and comic triumph, it’s hard to beat Drew Barrymore, barefoot and beautiful, running across the Fenway outfield and into the arms of her beloved. At least for the Red Sox fans among us. |
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Issue Date: April 8 - 14, 2005 Back to the Movies table of contents |
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