Big Fan

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ****

I can only imagine how Staten Island Paul would react to the 2009 NY Giants' season, which started off so promising and then fell apart in a wash of injuries and inconsistency. There was no off-field incident this year between a player and fan, but otherwise it's easy to picture Big Fan's world as indelibly real.

Big Fan seemed to come and go in theaters about as quickly as a Detroit Lions season goes down the drain, but deserves a cult life on DVD. The film is not just writer Robert Siegel's directorial debut, but a breaking out party for one of my favorite comedians, Patton Oswalt, as an actor.

Like Siegel's Oscar-nominated script for The Wrestler it plumbs the depths of sports hero worship, but rather than look at the athlete's rise and fall from the heights of fame it looks at the other side, those that worship them and are ultimately doomed to be disappointed by them. The film shows admirable lack of sentimentality and stark depiction of what it is to be a bitter and lonely adult who finds a sense of purpose in something that doesn't need you in the same way. The film manages to be richly, darkly funny even while also naturally being a bit of a downer.

The story is a sort of King of Comedy for sportstalk call-in junkies, in which a grown man (Oswalt) lives at home with his mother, although his delusions of grandeur aren't particularly grand -- in his mind, he's already succeeded: as champion phone-in fan. It's everyone around him who sees him as an utter failure. Paul is so dutiful that he writes out a script for his calls to sports talk shows, an excellent detail (I confess to having done this once myself, though, unlike Paul, I was a teenager at the time). He has one friend, Sal (indie stalwart Kevin Corrigan, quietly terrific) who is a bit more grounded if even shyer than Oswalt's Paul.

His mother, played wonderfully by Marcia Jean Kurtz, whose acting career stretches back to Panic in Needle Park and Dog Day Afternoon, has shades of Scorsese's mom in King of Comedy, as she's more of a presence as a voice offscreen, henpecking her son through the walls. She has clearly helped create strongly rooted neuroses in both her sons. There's a terrific scene with she and Oswalt in the kitchen that gets across their entire lifetime together with few words, while also demonstrating her collection of chinese food sauce packets organized via the OCD system.

Paul eventually meets (through both serendipity and a bit of stalking) the football star he's most obsessed aboout, Quantrell Bishop (newcomer Jonathan Hamm), a star linebacker, in a strip club; the film shows Paul more nervous about trying to meet Bishop than he is about the naked women shoving their asses in his face. Paul's fandom here goes beyond obsessive, it becomes sociopathic, putting his own welfare behind it. In these scenes the film almost seems to become an allegory for domestic abuse.

One nitpick: the script treats Bishop more like a quarterback -- linebackers can be differencemakers (see: Ray Lewis or former Giant Lawrence Taylor) but in Bishop's first game back he's treated more like someone the team revolves around ("He was rusty," Sal comments).

Sometimes the humor is so subtle and presented in such dark fashion it may not be clear how humorous it's meant to be. In one key scene late in the film, Oswalt paints himself in Eagles colors and wearing their uniform when he enters "enemy territory" in Philly, in order to track down his phone-in nemesis, Philadelphia Phil (a terrific Michael Rapaport)
Any big time sports fan who participates in a heated rivalry empathizes with how hard it actually is to go into an enemy bar -- and logic has nothing to do with it. Much of sports fandom seems based both on connecting with fellow fans and the cruel happiness that is more about the other team's misery than something positive.

The film builds tension and to its credit, you don't know where it's going in the final act; the climax does the near impossible: scares the hell out of you and then makes you laugh. Funny and sad -- that's Big Fan as a whole, too.