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Nick Hornby deeply understands the nature of men, their perception of women and, most importantly, how women see them. His books inspired three delightful movies on the battle of the sexes: “High Fidelity” (2000), “About a Boy” (2002), and now, “Fever Pitch.” Their humor stems from a certain reality, and comes from deep understanding and observation. These people exist. We went out with them. We know them. They are us.
Since “Fever Pitch” follows a Boston Red Sox fan and takes place during the wonderful 2004 season, do not, for some reason, assume it is a baseball movie. It is actually a story about men and women who are in love, and wish the best for each other, but simply do not share the same emotional dialogue. She wonders why he would want to go visit his parent’s house in Florida over spring training camp. He cannot fathom why this is a problem at all.
Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon play Lindsey and Ben, both in their early thirties. She starts to consider marriage. He is married, sort of, to the Red Sox. His affection for the team is on the problematic side when it comes to romance. “It’s been an issue for me…and women,” he admits. She works as a very well-paid business executive. He works as a high school teacher.
Is it appropriate for her to date lower than her income bracket? She has a strategy session with her girlfriends. For men, these sessions are less about strategy and more about how women truly get them. Women talk about how men fail to understand them. Men talk about women. Women wonder, “What on earth happened to him?” Lindsey is a full-time worker. Her only consolation is that she knows why she remains single – it’s all work.
Their first date ends rather badly. Lindsey is suffering from food poisoning and is hurling in a garbage can. But luckily for her, Ben is nice and looks after her, cleans her up, puts her to bed, and sleeps on the couch. In no time, they are head over heels for each other. The only thing that she does not get is that she is head over heels for Winter Guy.
Summer Guy is a big fan of the Red Sox. She is from Venus and he is from Fenway Park. He has season tickets, and the people in the adjacent seats are his “summer family.” When Summers family talks Red Sox history, they definitely sound like they know what they’re talking about. When he thinks about giving up his season tickets, he hears the other people say that “technically” he needs to give the tickets back to the team. His apartment looks like a sports memorabilia store. The telephone is even designed as a baseball mitt. She looks at his closet and sees the old T-shirts and warm-up jackets and says, “This is not a man’s closet.”
Jimmy Fallon is perfectly casted in that role. Veterans of “Saturday Night Live” tend to fade away into the 4th dimension of what is called “SNL comedy, which is pretty awful”. Only every now and then will someone like Bill Murray get out of bounds where he is more widely known. Recently, Fallon was part of the horrid “Taxi” movie, but here, it must be said, as it could be said for John Cusack in “High Fidelity” and Hugh Grant in “About a Boy,” you can not see any other person for the role.
He attains a unique completeness in his cheerfulness, his youthful zest, his reliance on the Sox for life’s direction, and his confusion regarding love. A part of him did not know that Freud died claiming, “What do women want?” Yet, it is evident he would have made sense of it.
Drew Barrymore is perfectly cast, in part because in real life, as in the movie, she is both a businesswoman and a producer (she is listed first among the film’s producers). Lindsey likes Ben because he is a good and nice man who happens to be quite funny, considerate, and even sexy. That’s the Winter Guy. The Summer Guy is all these things, as long as he has time to spare from being a sox fan. “All those things you feel for that team,” she tells him in despair, “I feel them, too, for you.”
Well, come on. Think how the guy feels. Sox fans view the team as being down 0-3 against the Yankees in the AL playoffs and the Yankees are winning the fourth game and the last fight because it is easy win to them. He is at a party he doesn’t want to go to. He loves the party, and then, he finds the sox were down 0-3 to the Yankees, and to his surprise, he finds out the Sox were down 0-3 against the Yankees and they tied it up and won 6-4 in the 12th inning. That is a regretful moment.
Is he a fool? I’d like to think so. But, after witnessing the last four minutes of Illinois match against Arizona, where they heroically managed to tie the score after being trailing by 15 points only to win in overtime, I might have been discontented.
Sure, it’s just a game. A small boy in the movie says to Ben, “Let me just leave you with this thought. You love the Sox, but do they ever love you back?” While Lindsey undoubtedly loves the boy, she is also aware that one transgression follows another. It is crucial to understand her emotions while watching the TV that shows her being knocked down and a foul ball, while beside her Ben is jumping out of his skin because he hasn’t noticed his girlfriend is unconscious. Women remember things like that.
The Farrelly brothers, Peter and Bobby, who directed the movie, usually make a different kind of movie (“Dumb and Dumber,” “Kingpin,” “There’s Something About Mary,” “Stuck on You”), and it is this diversity that fully characterizes them. Here, they tenderly, warmly, and with uncharacteristic restraint, visibly empathize with the characters, allowing Lindsey and Ben to evolve into people we care about.
So what’s happening? First, Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting” ) makes “Millions ”, and now this entire thing. The Farrellys might have been aided by the script of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel who, between them, have nine children and who wrote “Parents,” “Forget Paris,” “A League of Their Own” and knew quite a bit about baseball. What is truly moving is the way Lindsey tries, and tries, and works so hard to figure out Ben. When he attempts to describe why he loves the Red Sox, despite them perpetually letting him down, she claims, “You have a lyrical soul. You can survive the best and the worst.” What she fails to grasp is the fact that a girlfriend of a Red Sox fan needs to bear not only the best, but the worst, and have a soul that is not just lyrical, but very much forgiving as well. What does it mean when having his Sox tickets always comes first above everything she suggests? “Here’s a tip, Ben,” she says, “When your girlfriend says let’s go to Paris for the weekend- you go.”
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