FEVER Pitch sets up a triangle between a 30-year-old Boston schoolteacher and his two loves–one a beautiful business consultant, the other a baseball team called the Red Sox. Lindsay Meeks, the business consultant, falls for the person Ben Wrightman is when the Sox aren’t playing–a funny, kind, thoughtful boyfriend, and a beloved educator. She calls him “Winter Guy.”
But try though she might, she just can’t tolerate “Summer Guy,” the Ben who blows off her invitation to join her family at Easter to go watch the Red Sox take spring training in Florida. “They need me,” he says, which seems self-evident to him and utterly baffling to her. Worse yet, he declines an invitation in September for a free weekend jaunt because the Angels are coming to town.
“Here’s a tip,” she tells him. “When your girlfriend asks you to go to Paris, you say yes.”
This all comes as a particular shock to Lindsay because she feels initially that she’s being charitable to Ben by going out with him. She’s a hard-driving, high-earning overachiever who spends all her free time working out obsessively and dismisses his overtures because of his lower social standing (her friends refer to him dismissively as “the schoolteacher”). But she is head-over-heels by the time baseball season begins, and suddenly she finds herself no longer the most important person in his life and no longer the most important person in their relationship.
The romance heads toward oblivion the night Ben misses his first home game at Fenway Park in 11 years to accompany Lindsay to a friend’s birthday party–a raucous event followed by a moment of profound intimacy. The problem is that the game turns out to be the greatest comeback in Red Sox history. His subsequent meltdown seems to be a dismissal of her, and it breaks Lindsay’s heart.
To defend himself, Ben defends his fanaticism for the Red Sox. “Have you ever cared about anything for 23 years?” he demands. Lindsay replies that, 23 years ago, she was seven years old–and that if she were still obsessed with marrying Scott Baio she would think there was something very wrong with her.
Fever Pitch borrows its name and spirit from the English writer Nick Hornby’s first book, a delightful and hugely successful account of his lifelong obsession with the Arsenal soccer team in England. “Sometimes,” Hornby writes, “hurting someone is unavoidable” when you care so much about a team. Hornby took that idea and turned his book into a 1997 movie (never released in this country) about an Arsenal fan and his long-suffering girlfriend.
It was an ingenious conceit that might have been borrowed from the opening number of Damn Yankees, which features the suffering wife of a baseball fan lamenting her fate: When we met in 1938 it was November. / When I said that I would be his mate, it was December. / I reasoned he would be the greatest husband that a girl had ever found. / That’s what I reasoned. That’s what I reasoned. Then April rolled around. / Six months out of every year, I might as well be made of stone. / Six months out of every year, when I’m with him, I’m alone.
Screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, and directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly, have taken Hornby’s ingenious conceit and ingeniously relocated it to the environs of Fenway Park. It was sheer dumb luck, or kismet, that they found themselves making the movie last fall, just as the Red Sox were about to reverse their team’s 86-year curse and finally win a World Series again. The new movie’s creative team rewrote its final scenes on the fly to take account of Boston’s triumph over its record of failure, and harmonize it beautifully with the outcome of Ben and Lindsay’s romance.
You want to love Fever Pitch, because it is so cleverly constructed and stuffed with all sorts of interesting ancillary characters–like Lindsay’s hardbodied married friend, Robin, who subtly attempts to sabotage the relationship because Lindsay is more successful than Robin in business while Robin has one-upped Lindsay in the relationship department. More important, it doesn’t turn Lindsay into a shrewish baseball widow forever complaining about her boyfriend’s lack of attention to her. And it doesn’t portray Ben as a sports jerk who becomes ill-mannered and boorish because of his passion.
But there’s something terribly off in Fever Pitch, and that something is a someone: Drew Barrymore, who plays Lindsay and is also one of the movie’s producers. This is Barrymore’s first real effort to play someone who is a semblance of a grown human being, and she is just dreadful. Ganz and Mandel have written Lindsay as a clever, literate, and intelligent woman, but Barrymore sounds (as Pauline Kael once said of the acting skills of Cyd Charisse) as though she learned her lines by rote. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more unconvincing than Drew Barrymore delivering a monologue about how much she loves mathematics.
Jimmy Fallon, who plays Ben, is as natural and amusing to watch as Barrymore is wooden and painful. The former Saturday Night Live star made a disastrous transition to the movies with a flop called Taxi last year, but Fever Pitch ought to make him a star. He combines good looks with an endearing gawkiness, and that rare ability only a few performers (like Christopher Walken) have of sounding spontaneous–speaking his lines the way people actually talk, as though he’s just thinking of them as he’s saying them.
Fallon’s spontaneity slams into Barrymore’s studied affect, and the result is a car wreck. It’s not just that they don’t have chemistry; throughout the movie they stand next to each other like people on a bus who’ve never met. You don’t believe these two people are in love. You aren’t even sure these two people inhabit the same planet. So what we have in Fever Pitch is a romantic comedy where everything works except the romance. It’s a solid single, maybe even a ground-rule double. But it could have been a grand slam.
John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
