Nick Hornby’s wonderful 1992 nonfiction book, Fever Pitch, tied 24 years of memories to a series of English football matches, culminating in that empyrean moment in 1989 when Arsenal midfielder Michael Thomas scored an injury-time goal to win that beleaguered London club its first championship in 18 seasons. It was about the religion of sports fandom, about how football can eclipse all other meaningful relationships in a man’s world and how a man can feel perfectly justified letting it do so. And it got it all so hilariously, mercilessly and terrifyingly right that even if you happened to root for Liverpool — or, perchance, believe that proper football is played for touchdowns, not goals — Hornby’s words seemed to be printed on Mylar.

Now Fever Pitch is a movie, directed by the Farrelly brothers and adapted
by that old-reliable comedy team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (Night
Shift, Splash, City Slickers). The setting has been transposed to
Boston, the sport of choice to baseball and the team in question to — who else?
— the Boston Red Sox, whose 86-year “Curse of the Bambino” made Arsenal’s two-decade
losing streak look as diminutive as the right-field line at Candlestick Park.
The possessor of the fatal fan attraction is now Ben Wrightman (Jimmy Fallon),
a high school geometry teacher who hasn’t missed a home game or (coincidentally?)
had a long-term relationship in more than a decade. As Fever Pitch begins,
in the fall of 2003, Ben’s carefully ordered universe is ruptured by the intrusion
of a beautiful businesswoman named Lindsey (Drew Barrymore), who first encounters
Ben leading his students on an off-campus field trip and, as they start to date,
gradually realizes the obsessive degree of his extracurricular activity. Will
there be enough room in this relationship for man, woman and Green Monster?



No matter Hornby’s own involvement in bringing Fever Pitch to the screen — he’s credited as an executive producer — the film ranks among the most specious acts of literary adaptation since Troy claimed to have something to do with The Iliad. And that high infidelity may well be the least of the movie’s problems. Even on its own terms, Fever Pitch strikes out. Despite its setting, the film clearly isn’t the work of real sports fans; it lacks the fundamental love of the game — any game — that graces Ron Shelton’s sports pictures. And the more Fever Pitch strives to manufacture Ben’s baseball mania, through bits of costume and set design exhumed from the studio prop warehouse, the more hollow it seems. It doesn’t feel Ben’s mad enthusiasm in its bones, and so neither do we — a fatal flaw in a movie that offers baseball both as the main character’s raison d’etre and his chief antagonist.

The actors don’t help much, either. With his perpetually untucked undershirts,
tousled hair and husky-mumbly voice, Fallon tries to coast by on the reputation
of cool irreverence he earned during his six seasons on Saturday Night
Live, but projects none of the sense of a vibrant inner character that
Adam Sandler (who would have been perfect) does even in a subpar part. Barrymore,
who also produced the film, is chipper and lovely to look at, though in what has
been heralded by some as her first “grown-up” movie role she’s about as mature
as a teenager playing dress-up in her mom’s business suit, and her perky mannerisms
quickly grow tiresome. (For the record, Barrymore was immeasurably more grown-up
in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.) Neither she nor Fallon receives
much direction by the Farrellys, who are at an utter loss working this far removed
from the wanton slapstick of Kingpin, There’s Something About Mary and
a couple of other movies they made before they turned all maudlin and PC on us
(Shallow Hal, Stuck on You). Which was still preferable to
Fever Pitch, a romantic comedy so unfunny, charmless and hopelessly ordinary
that Arthur Hiller might have signed his name to it.


If every cloud — even the Red Sox’s — has a silver lining,
Fever Pitch’s is that Hornby’s memoir was filmed once before, in
1997, by the British director David Evans, with Hornby himself doing the script.
Evans’ Fever Pitch was never properly released in this country —
in the years preceding the success of Bend it Like Beckham,
Hollywood rested assured that English football (or soccer, if you must) was
anathema to American moviegoers. But it got right most of what the Farrellys get
wrong, and is built around a brilliant performance by Colin Firth that may be
the richest in the screen’s growing gallery of Hornby man-boys (a formidable bunch
that also includes John Cusack in High Fidelity and Hugh Grant in
About a Boy). No doubt the whiff of a marketing opportunity will
prompt cable broadcasters to begin running it again and video stores to replenish
their supplies of the DVD. So stay home and watch it. Or, better yet, read the
book.


FEVER PITCH | Directed by PETER FARRELLY and BOBBY FARRELLY | Written by LOWELL GANZ and BABALOO MANDEL, based on the book by NICK HORNBY | Produced by AMANDA POSEY, ALAN GREENSPAN, GIL NETTER, DREW BARRYMORE, NANCY JUVONEN and BRADLEY THOMAS | Released by Fox | Citywide

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