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Review: ‘Big Fan’
I couldn’t quite decide what to make of “Big Fan.” In his directorial debut, writer Robert Siegel (“The Wrestler”), paints a fully realized and natural portrait of a sports-obsessed nerd living in his own world, doing his best to block out the noise coming from anything besides football. Patton Oswalt, although not a sports obsessive, brings a strong understanding of fandom, thanks to his love of movies and comics, to the role, but he seems too clever for the sad-sack character at times.
While it is easy to understand the character’s disdain for the monotony of suburban Staten Island life, and even easier to laugh at the insider world of sports talk show geekdom Siegel creates, Oswalt’s is not a sympathetic character. I never really cheered for him, though I never completely held him in contempt, leaving me almost apathetic by the movie’s dramatic climax.
Siegel’s gritty direction and naturalistic script harken back to some 70s films, and his anti-hero is reminiscent of a nerdy Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.” But the stakes are just too low here to make the conceit work.
Below is my official review that runs in Friday’s paper:
With apologies to the late Karl Marx, in modern American society, sport has become the opiate of the masses.
The common fan may find in sports fandom a refuge from day-to-day life, a chance to escape from responsibilities and obligations for a handful of hours a week.
But true junkies cannot be satiated. Unfulfilled by simply indulging a passion, they become consumed by it. They feed themselves not just on the games, but on the ancillary compulsions that come with fanaticism, such as the over-caffeinated world of sports talk radio.
In “Big Fan,” Paul Aufiero’s (Patton Oswalt) love of the New York Giants doesn’t offer a diversion from his life; it is his life.
With his directorial debut, which he also penned, Robert Siegel ventures into the dark places where the sports addict lives — in Aufiero’s case, the airwaves and his mother’s house.
Thirty-five-year-old Paul has done his best to remove any substantive distractions from his life, allowing him to focus all of his time on his obsession with the Giants and their star linebacker Quantrell Bishop.
Paul doesn’t find working in a tiny parking garage toll booth in Staten Island to be a mind-numbing endeavor, simply an opportunity for him to obsess over the tepid scripts he uses for his nightly calls to a local sports radio show.
His life might be adrift and pointless, but his calls are tight and focused. With each successive call, Paul, the public defender and champion of his gridiron heroes from the Meadowlands, feels his sense of singular purpose reinforced, a feeling amplified by his friend Sal (Kevin Corrigan), who holds him in high esteem for his trivial linguistic feats on the radio.
Paul’s obnoxious mother feels the time has long since passed for her youngest son to leave the safety of her house, from which he makes most of his late-night calls to the Sports Dog radio program. She wants him to find a career, maybe even meet a “nice girl,” but Paul explains that he is happy with his life. He doesn’t want to lead the mundane life that his family wishes for him.
Oswalt, with his sympathy for nerdy underdogs and biting disregard for the inauthentic, imbues Paul with an ironic and caustic haughtiness as he dismisses his Chinese food packet-hoarding mother and ambulance-chasing attorney brother. Though Oswalt brings a rich and tender humanity to a character for whom we reluctantly want to cheer, the script paints Paul’s family in grotesque caricature, leaving one with the feeling that Siegel has crossed the line from sardonic satire to a sort of unnecessary class warfare.
Siegel and Oswalt do begin to bend sympathies towards their lovable loser. And though he might lack ambition, at least Paul knows his place in the world, comfortable with who he is and in what he believes. That is, until a night when his sad fairy-tale life as gridiron troubadour comes crashing into the realization that, despite his imagined fellowship with the Giants, he is not a part of their world.
After catching a glimpse of their hero Bishop, Paul and Sal follow him and his entourage to a Manhattan strip club. But things go terribly wrong when Paul approaches his hero, a move of clumsy naivete that eventually lands him in the hospital courtesy of a beating from Bishop.
Just when it seems comfortable to find humor in this innocuous loser, the movie takes a turn from pitifully funny to the darker places of the junkie experience. A slave to his passion, Paul refuses to lay blame at the foot of the symbol of his sacred obsession, despite the protestations and meddling of his family and the authorities. Slowly, Siegel’s anti-hero concocts a misdirected revenge fantasy, the vague nature of which works to build a discomfiting suspense at a slow boil.
As Paul ultimately attempts to exact vengeance for a humiliating slight brought on by the public revelation of the extent of his addiction, he exclaims, “You didn’t have to be mean. Everybody’s always so mean.”
Unfortunately, Siegel’s ambivalence toward the character produces little in the way of empathy, and the audience will likely be glad to let this unfortunate junkie return to the small box he has created of his life.
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