Fever Pitch
Reviewed by Rick Groen
**½
Directed by Peter Farrelly
and Bobby Farrelly
Written by Lowell Ganz
and Babaloo Mandel
Starring Drew Barrymore
and Jimmy Fallon
Classification: PG
Crafted in his usual welcoming style -- his house of prose uses self-deprecating humour as the front porch that leads to a living-room of keen insights -- Nick Hornby once wrote a splendid little book about his life-long obsession with the Arsenal soccer team. A few years later, Hornby himself helped to adapt (actually, dismantle) the book into a quasi-British movie that starred Colin Firth but swiped its romance-comedy conventions straight from Hollywood.
Now, along comes Hollywood in the flesh to finish the job. In this version of Fever Pitch, Arsenal soccer gives way to Boston Red Sox baseball, Firth turns into Jimmy Fallon, and the boys behind the camera are none other than the notorious Farrelly brothers. Warning: Expect projectile vomiting.
A few scenes in, when the vomit does hurl, expect to be surprised too. In fact, the Farrellys' contributions make this flick somewhat better than it has a right to be, and certainly better than it would have been if left solely in the scripted clutches of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, those crusty vets who've devoted their entire screenwriting career to tightening the same old bolts on the same old comic formula.
Fever Pitch is best when departing from the text to indulge in throwaway lines and antic bits of business. Directing a script that's intent on never straying from the playing field of tired convention, the Farrellys, bless their sophomoric souls, at least keep trying to sneak off into the locker room to snap a few towels at the bare-assed proprieties.
Of course, back on the playing field, the box score makes for a predictable read. Ben the lowly high-school teacher (Fallon) meets Lindsey the corporate bigwig (Drew Barrymore), and surprises himself (not to mention us) by playing up to the competition. Their romance blooms in winter -- the first date finds her with a bad case of the flu and the Farrellys with their barf bag at the ready.
Alas, with the coming of spring, true love must surmount the impediment of his slavish devotion to the Red Sox, those perennial losers who hadn't won a World Series since shoes came with high buttons. Until last October, that is, and victory at long last.
Apparently, this real-life miracle necessitated some 11th-hour rejigging of the screenplay, but what was good for the team proves unkind to the movie. The climax is now ludicrous, at least to anyone put off by the sight of Barrymore, in the midst of an actual playoff game against the dreaded Yankees, clambering over the centre-field wall and racing across the diamond toward home and heart.
Happily, before we reach that climactic strikeout, some of the locker-room humour hits a clean single or two. The picture is occasionally amusing on the subject of the murky depths to which fandom can descend. Like taping a game that you can't watch live, then studiously blocking your ears to any wayward mention of the score -- in this dogged ritual, the present gets deferred to the future, where it pretends not to be the past (technology has freed the obsessive fan from the chains of time). Also, the innocent wisdom of the non-fan is good for the odd chuckle. When Ben boasts that he's off to Florida for the Sox's spring-training session, Lindsey is duly impressed: "Oh, they let you train with them?"
These little moments, caught in asides or tucked as sight gags into a love-is-in-the-air montage, tend to work quite nicely. The Farrellys have less luck when they swing for the fences, notably in a shower scene -- involving a naked Ben, his buddies and a straight razor -- that might have been recycled from the cutting-room floor of There's Something About Mary. Suddenly, we're in a whole other movie that's in grave danger of getting slapped with an R-rating -- tantamount to forfeiting the game in today's young teen market.
As for the principals, a quick word about Barrymore. Actors, like athletes, are slaves to their bodies, and Drew appears to be on a regimen of anti-steroids. She's slimmed way down, her face has thinned out, but the camera's verdict is mixed -- her new look has eroded more than a bit of her natural charm.
The twitchy Fallon, yet another SNL expatriate, is a different matter entirely. His screen presence divides audiences somewhere considerably left of the middle -- you either tolerate him, or you hate him. He's tolerable here.
Let's give the last word to the man who started all this. Pondering the rigid exclusivity of professional sport, its rejection even of the very talented in favour only of the sublimely gifted, Hornby writes with characteristic honesty: "Sport doesn't allow you to dream in the way that writing or acting or painting or middle management does." Too true.
As a motion picture, Fever Pitch is merely competent yet still capable of cracking the Friday lineup and playing to big crowds. If this same movie were a baseball player, it couldn't make the softball team in a sandlot league.