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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Jimmy Fallon and the ever-luminous Drew Barrymore bunt their way through this Farrelly brothers ode to baseball.
Apr 8, 2005 | The end of an 86-year losing streak is a great backdrop for a romantic comedy, the perfect metaphor for finding love against all odds. In the Farrelly brothers' "Fever Pitch," Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon find true love, just barely, as the long-beleaguered Boston Red Sox wend their way toward winning the World Series. The picture is supposedly about a character who puts his love of baseball before his love of actual people. But in some ways, the picture itself does the same thing. By the end of it, we have a vivid understanding of how desperately Red Sox fans care about their team. But the human-to-human love story tucked in amid the dementia feels like an afterthought, a workaround to the problem of being consumed by the love that, in New York City, at least, dare not speak its name.
Like nearly every Farrelly brothers movie that has come before it, "Fever Pitch" is made with so much genuine affection, and such obvious good intentions, that it seems churlish to treat it too harshly -- the picture is reasonably entertaining and shows glimmers of the Farrellys' characteristic offhanded sweetness. Yet my disappointment in it makes me feel I've been banished from Eden. "Fever Pitch" lacks that Farrelly spark, that warm, crazy glint that made movies like "Stuck on You" and the unfairly maligned "Shallow Hal" glisten, even through their flaws. That may be partly because the Farrellys didn't write "Fever Pitch": The script, inspired by Nick Hornby's 1992 memoir, is by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, who specialize in sleek products like "Splash," "A League of Their Own" and "City Slickers." "Fever Pitch" may at times look and feel like a Farrelly brothers movie. But get too close and you see all the ways in which it just doesn't move as it should. It's an impostor in the correct uniform.
Fallon plays Ben, a 10th-grade math teacher whose shirttails are always dangling beguilingly over the waistband of his ill-fitting corduroys -- in other words, he's the kind of shy, smart, schlumpy charmer that, in the movie universe at least, women need to be convinced to look twice at, even though underneath it all he's supposedly the best kind of catch a woman could hope for. Luckily, successful, adorable career-gal Lindsey (Barrymore) does look twice, even though at first she's convinced Ben isn't her type. But their relationship gels immediately: On the night of what's supposed to be their first date, Ben tends to Lindsey (and cleans up) when a nasty stomach bug lays her low. Her dog adores him. The three of them have picnics in the park, during which Ben lists the things he loves about her -- you know, those inventories of stray freckles and unconscious instances of nose-crinkling that movie characters so often feel compelled to make.
But that's during the winter. What Lindsey doesn't know is that once baseball season starts, Ben belongs to the Red Sox. He has season tickets, and the seats are amazing: He inherited them from his uncle (played in an all-too-brief cameo by Boston comic Lenny Clark), who ignited Ben's adoration of the game when he was just a lonely, awkward kid. His friends (among them the always likable Willie Garson, from "Sex and the City") clamor for the opportunity to be his guest at select games.
"Fever Pitch"
Directed by Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly
Starring Drew Barrymore, Jimmy Fallon
Lindsey, at first, is happy enough to tag along with him, despite the fact that the "regulars" in the nearby seats clearly distrust her for not liking the game enough (or maybe for just not being working-class enough -- a bit of reverse classism that you wouldn't expect from the Farrellys, who are among the few filmmakers I can think of who actually get class). But before long, Lindsey realizes that the Red Sox schedule rules Ben's life. No family event is ever more important. He owns almost no grown-up clothes, other than sneakers and T-shirts. Tensions arise. She loves him, but what should she do?
