"Fever Pitch"

All of that makes "Fever Pitch" sound disarmingly mild. You're probably wondering, "What's the girl's problem? He's a great guy, and he loves baseball -- so what?" And that is, ultimately, exactly what the movie wants you to feel, even though Ben's harmless love of baseball causes him to do some not very cool things. The Farrellys, New Englanders by birth, love the Red Sox so much that they forgive their lead character a multitude of sins that, in any of their other movies, they'd be too gentlemanly (and too humane) to ever allow. When Lindsey excitedly announces that she has to go on a last-minute business trip to Paris and is going to whisk him off for a romantic weekend there, he hems and haws -- he'll have to miss an important game. Understandably, she's stung. Meanwhile, we're left with one crisp image ringing through our brains: A weekend in bed, in Paris, with Drew Barrymore. What kind of schmuck would pass that up to watch a bunch of guys running around in tight pants?

Ben finally does allow himself to miss a game, only to ruin an exceedingly romantic moment -- the sort of moment at which both men and women are at their most vulnerable -- by grousing about not being at Fenway. And worst of all, when Lindsey is struck and knocked out by a foul ball while Ben's back is turned, he's more interested in high-fiving the guy who caught it; only after that does he notice his girlfriend, slumped unconscious in her seat. Later he watches this horrifying moment played out on TV, and while he flinches momentarily, the incident ends up meaning nothing to him. As Ben is written, he's the kind of great "catch" women would probably be better off not looking twice at. He's one of those ostensibly nice guys who's really not so nice at all.

Of course, by the end of "Fever Pitch," Ben has supposedly changed. But we don't believe it for a minute. Fallon is extremely well-cast as Ben -- in his early scenes, especially, his stammering awkwardness makes him at least vaguely appealing. But by the movie's end, we're long past the point of just wishing he'd grow up -- we've begun to suspect that his lost-puppy routine is just a coverup for an essential lack of character. And Barrymore, as always, is luminous and delightful, but the role is beneath her. (She needs to stop taking these cheerful girlfriend roles, especially in movies that she's involved in producing, like this one.)

"Fever Pitch" is really a love story about baseball, and considering the sport is our national pastime, there's nothing wrong with that. In Hornby's book, the game in question was football (that is to say, soccer), so for an American movie the switch to baseball makes sense: The perceived reality, at least, is that baseball fans -- particularly those persistently dreamy Red Sox types -- are much more delightfully innocent than those scary Anglo and European football fans. How many times have you seen the words "baseball" and "hooligan" used together?

But the reality is that, maybe particularly in Boston, baseball attracts its fair share of boozy loudmouths, as I can attest after having lived near Fenway Park for four years in the '80s. During baseball season, just getting home from the subway after work (dressed in ordinary work apparel, not expensive yuppie togs) meant trudging through bands of noisy cretins whose "love of the game" apparently translated into a special license to harass anyone not kitted out in a backward baseball cap. I would see parents, particularly dads, headed out to the ballgame with their kids, and feel bummed out that they had to reckon with these yobbos just to enjoy an evening at the ballpark. And I could never get over the fact that although Boston is an incredibly racially diverse city, the faces I saw coming to and from those ballgames were almost universally white.

That's not to knock baseball, a sport many people love for all the right reasons. (And the charms of Fenway Park, even to people who aren't baseball fans, are undeniable.) But to use romanticism of the sport as a substitute for actually writing a character -- "He's not a bad guy, he's just a crazy dreamer!" -- is lazy and dull. And while boyishness is charming, outright immaturity masquerading as boyishness wears thin pretty quickly. At one point in "Fever Pitch," Lindsey throws open Ben's closet door and, facing a sea of Red Sox jerseys, jackets and sweats, laments, "This isn't a man's closet!" It isn't a man's life either.

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