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It's enough to reverse the just-reversed curse

By Steve Scheibal
American-Statesman Staff

Posted: April 8, 2005

No good can come of this.

"Fever Pitch" is not just disposable sports schlock in the tradition of, say, "Forget Paris." With torn-from-the-headlines immediacy, it takes the still-glowing embers of the Boston Red Sox championship and reprocesses them into Hollywood goo.

The movie ignores its namesake, the terrific memoir by Nick Hornby about the interwoven threads of life and football (that's soccer, to you). It skips past Hornby's rich, self-conscious chasm between life's exquisite ordinariness and sport's vicarious glory.

This is a boy-meets-girl-meets-baseball team story, a feather-light piece of summer opportunism where our team successfully incites a cad. The movie is not without redeeming features -- it was, purportedly, made by Boston fans. Nevertheless, if selling Babe Ruth nearly a century ago invited a curse on the Red Sox, I shudder at the consequences of "Fever Pitch."

Jimmy Fallon plays Ben, a charismatic teacher with an apartment that pre-pubescent Red Sox fans can only dream of. Lindsey (a flat Drew Barrymore) is a career-driven business-something-or-other. They meet during a field trip, apparently to Lindsey's computer monitor, and arc toward happiness. But the Red Sox will not be ignored. Come spring, Ben is dragging Lindsey to hang out with the blue-collar stiffs in the six-figure seats at Fenway Park. Soon she must choose between her own obviously unhealthy obsession with her job and her boyfriend's obviously sweet obsession with nine strangers. Three predictable turns and one ludicrous Big Finish later, and . . . well, let's just say nobody dies unexpectedly.

The Farrelly brothers, the directors who also brought you "Dumb and Dumber" and "There's Something about Mary," claim allegiance to the Red Sox and they frequently get the team's fan base (known with appropriately pompous drama as Red Sox Nation) just right. They do conjure some very funny and familiar scenes of dread and devotion among the fan base, and Fallon is surprisingly convincing integrating its mania into his character. But the directors seem to have spent far more time replicating the sound of vomit (very real, by the way) than sorting through the clashing contexts between love of team and love of another.

Toned-down grossness does not subtlety make.

In a concession to the Bens of the world, the Farrellys pack their movie with bits of history and trivia that will make little sense to anyone but hard-core fans who already know it. Unfortunately and most reprehensibly for us, "Fever Pitch" builds its silly denouement around the biggest half-inning in Red Sox history -- the bottom of the ninth inning in the fourth game of last year's American League Championship Series, when the team began climbing out of its grave against the New York Yankees.

It is a chilling scene.

Next come shots as inexplicable, exploitative and gratuitous as any sex scene ever filmed: Fallon and Barrymore cavorting on the field after the real-life Red Sox win their first title since 1918. It's worth noting that as of the advanced screening for "Fever Pitch," the Red Sox had opened their new season with two losses to the Yankees.