Ben and Lindsey meet when he, a lowly Boston science teacher, brings several kids on a field trip to her corporate office. He likes her, she likes him and sparks fly. They date, get serious and fall in love. Lindsey (Drew Barrymore), upwardly reaching career gal that she is, hasn’t been so happy in ages, and Ben (Jimmy Fallon) seems like a great catch. He’s cute, he’s funny and he’s seemingly well adjusted.
But Lindsey’s girlfriends warn her that something scary may lurk just beyond Ben’s affable exterior. How can he be so perfect and so single at the age of “twenty-ten”? Something must be fishy about the guy, but what?
Then the problem surfaces. The couple came together in winter and now it’s spring, with summer just around the bend. What Lindsey doesn’t know is that Ben is a Red Sox fan. Not just a fan. A super-fan. A Sox groupie. A diehard baseball season junkie of the highest caliber.
He never misses a game. He travels down to Florida every March to watch spring training. His apartment is a shrine to the game and the team he loves, decked out on every wall, table and mantel with signed souvenirs and memorabilia. He has Sox pajamas, Sox pillows, Sox posters. He even has Yankees toilet paper.
Ben, reasonable in all other things, cannot control his Red Sox frenzy, and Lindsey wonders if she’ll ever be able to replace the first love of his life-baseball. Can her white-collar rigidity and his rabid fandom merge into a successful relationship? Smells like a romantic comedy to me.
“Fever Pitch” has been adapted from Nick Hornby’s novel of the same name, and Hornby knows his way around the romantic travails of the fussy “man-boy” like no one else. Previous film adaptations of his novels include “About a Boy” and “High Fidelity,” which substituted music for baseball as the lead character’s fixation of choice. His male leads are likeable losers, boys in men’s bodies who are forced to finally grow up when they have to choose love and companionship over the insular, fetishized little lives they’ve so meticulously cultivated for themselves.
Hornby’s novel used Britain and soccer as his backdrop, whereas the Americanized version updates the action to Bean Town and the Sox’ near-mythical World Series run of 2004. Ben has season tickets right behind the dugout, where he and other Sox supporters speak in hushed tones about topics as deadly serious as Bill Buckner and the Curse of the Bambino. The film beautifully captures not only the bristling ambience of Fenway Park on game day (“the heart and soul of Boston”), but also the mindset of an avid fan base that’s been banging its head against the Green Monster for over 80 years.
Some say that the Sox have refined losing to “an art form,” but Ben sees each new season as “a clean slate.” “It’s good for your soul to invest yourself in something you can’t control,” he says. His faith in the team may seem endearing at first, but it’s really a mask for maturity issues he’s never yet had to confront. A failure in dating relationships, Ben can only love unconditionally something that will never love him back. When Lindsey asks him to explain his sports obsession, he tellingly praises baseball for being “safe” and “unambiguous.”
After years of merry poop-flinging in comedies as crass and quintessential as “Dumb and Dumber” and “There’s Something About Mary,” the Farrelly brothers (Bobby and Peter) have finally hit a more grown-up stride with “Fever Pitch,” largely substituting the observational for the scatological.
Their slapstick had been getting toothless in their last few at bats (“Shallow Hal,” “Stuck on You”), but they were showing an encouraging eagerness to replace gross-outs with sentiment. Even when those weren’t laugh-out-loud funny, they had an unabashed sweetness and optimism about humanity that made them hard to resist.
It should come as little surprise then that they finally made the leap to flat-out, adult romantic comedy (without “hair gel” or Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit). While much of the broad comedy in the film falls flat or seems out of place (Barrymore gets beaned by a fly ball, a dog eating vomit, people making predictable pratfalls and verbal slips), the Farrelly’s do right by the central characters and their sweet, messy romance.
Hornby’s source material adds something resoundingly shocking to the well-worn Farrelly template-subtext. This is a wry, deceptively simple film that is very wise about a lot of different things, from sports enthusiasm to conversation to male insecurity, and especially about relationships. Sure, Ben and Lindsey have plenty of sticky-sweet kissy moments of the type that can only really happen in the movies, but there are darker shades to their relationship, too. The couple’s fights have real pain and ugliness to them, and both characters come off as fully realized, three-dimensional people with jobs, hopes and responsibilities that really matter to them. Consequently, the happiness of these characters really matters to the audience.
Barrymore has long shined in playful romances, and she gets even better with age and slight tweaks to the formula. Here her tenderness and flirty sexuality are undercut by a deep reserve of sadness, loneliness and the tentativeness of someone who’s long been unlucky in love. Fallon, too, is very good with the bittersweet material; his ability to be charming and poignant at the same time lends Ben’s sluggish journey into manhood an urgency that would have been lacking in the wake of a more stereotypical performance.
One wonders how much better “Fever Pitch” might have been had it come from more refined filmmakers than the guys who gleefully brought you “Me, Myself, and Irene,” but it’s still pretty good on its own merits. The screenplay and lead performances kick in when the direction becomes lax, and the Farrelly’s snap out of their more frantic paces when it counts the most. What they lack in technical craft, the brothers make up for in spirit.
“Fever Pitch” is joyous about baseball, warm and insightful about love and gentle about aging and self-delusion. It’s still very much a “movie,” replete with a wholly manipulative, lump-in-throat ballpark climax, but it’s a good “movie” with far more shading and a more expansive heart than your average romantic comedy. Is it a home run? Nah, but it’s pretty close. More like bases loaded with Johnny Damon sidling up to the plate. Sometimes that’s a magical combination.
*** of ****