"Fever Pitch" Sucks

By Ryan McGowan

I tried.  I really tried to give “Fever Pitch” a fair shake.  I tried really hard not to walk into the movie theater with my mind already made up.  I rationalized to myself, “It’s about the Red Sox.” “There’s all these great shots of Boston and Fenway and the Sox players.” “It’s made by the Farrelly Brothers; how could they possibly screw it up?”  It didn’t matter.  At the risk of sounding too blunt, “Fever Pitch” sucks.It doesn’t suck in a pathetic, Sports Guy-esque “Jimmy Fallon is from New York, waaah waaah” way.  It doesn’t even suck in a Drew-Barrymore’s-demise-from-pretty-hot-in-“Wedding-Singer” depressing way.  

It sucked so bad, I would probably go see “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” (a preview I saw before the feature tonight that is destined to become “Mona Lisa Smile” for teeny boppers) before I saw “Fever Pitch” again.  The best part of the movie was the fact that I didn’t pay a dime for it, having used two Showcase passes that I had hanging around in my room since roughly the Reggie Jefferson era of the Red Sox.

I know what you are probably thinking: “McGowan, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?”

The movie did have its redeeming qualities.  I laughed out loud at a number of scenes, not the least of which was when the bald anesthesiologist (who was ironically a bald chiropractor friend of Ted Stroehmann in the Farrelly Brothers classic “There’s Something About Mary”) was shaving Ben’s (Jimmy Fallon’s) pubes in the shower.  The scene when Ben was auctioning off his tickets for the season (“draft day”) and he made the other guys dance (“That’s not a Yankee Dance!  That’s like a Devil Ray dance!  Let me see a Yankee Dance!”) to get Yankee game tickets was pretty funny.  And I definitely appreciated the reference to Ben having Yankee toilet paper around the house.  

I simply walked out of “Fever Pitch” feeling like I got cheated out of what could have been a funny and entertaining movie that was just ruined on so many levels.  For the first time, I walked out of a Farrelly Brothers movie feeling that they could have done something so much better.

First of all, on a personal note, I was turned off from the very beginning of the movie by the stereotypes of “unsuccessful, immature, neo-adolescent teacher with no ambition and no money” and “fast-track, successful, career woman who makes a ton of money and owns a townhouse in the Back Bay at age 30.”  As someone who has spent his entire adult life as either a high school teacher or a graduate student pursuing a degree in educational administration, I hate this stereotype with a passion.  Reason #1 why Fallon’s character should never have had anything to do with Barrymore in the first place: if a girl has to “learn to deal” with what you do for a living because it’s not prestigious enough or it’s not financially rewarding enough for her or her gossiping, scorekeeping friends, then give her the boot and find someone new.  I’ll get more into that later, but right from the beginning, when they were walking in the Common and she didn’t remember his last name because she would refer to him as “Ben the schoolteacher” to her friends, he should have walked away.  If a girl is that hung up on what you do for a living, then drop her and move on.  Sure, you should try to squeeze a few months of late-night booty calls out of it, but you certainly don’t want to get emotionally invested.

There’s a lot more about the teacher stereotype that was personally insulting to me, but let’s skip over that in the interest of time and move on.  I understand that the movie was supposed to be a comedy, but I think the satire was so over-the-top, it became campy and unbelievable.  First of all, Fallon’s character had no interest in the Celtics, or in any other sports team other than the Red Sox.  This was absurd.  Granted, the Sox are for all intents and purposes the most popular sports team in the area right now, but anyone who grew up in Boston in the 1980’s would at least have a passive interest in the Celtics.  If Ben had no interest in the C’s and wouldn’t even acknowledge them, then he’s a terrible representation of Red Sox Nation.  How many Sox fans do you know who have no interest in the C’s, the Pats, and/or the Bruins (when they are playing)?  I can’t think of any.  I have lived in New England for almost 27 years and I have never met one single person who roots for only one team and none of the others.  In that respect, the character of Ben was an awful representative of Sox fans.

I guess that is the overarching reason why I hated this movie: the over-the-top exaggeration of Sox fans to look like completely idiotic buffoons.  I wanted to throw my notebook at the screen during the scene when the guys in the surrounding seats at Fenway were rattling off the history behind the Curse of the Bambino, and they were starting to choke up and feel actual pain when they mentioned Bucky Dent, Buckner, etc.  Now don’t get me wrong, those names have never made me want to jump up and click my heels, but I don’t remember the mention of them ever driving me to near-tears and prompting me to tell another grown man, “Stop it, you’re going to kill me!”  The video of the guys at spring training and Ben saying he ranks in order of importance in his life “Red Sox, sex, and breathing” was just stupid and not at all funny.  I know the satire was supposed to be about obsessive fans.  Tell me to lighten up or whatever, but I just found it incredibly dim-witted and borderline insulting to my intelligence.

Another key reason why I hated this movie was the Lindsey character, played by Barrymore.  Basically, this girl was a composite of the negative aspects of almost ex-girlfriend I’ve ever had.  It summed it up perfectly for me when, in reference to the passion that he felt for the Sox, she said to him, “I was hoping you would redirect that passion to me.”  That clinched it for me.  That line was the epitome of everything I’ve always hated in the women I’ve dated in the past.  To me, this line shows why at least 90% of women are really evil, at least when it comes to relationships.  I think there are a ton of women out there who, when they start dating a guy, take it upon themselves to “reform” something about that guy, whether it is some bad habit, underachieving lifestyle, or something else that they don’t like, and mold him into something closer to her tastes.  Unfortunately, most women don’t realize that they aren’t going to “reform” any guys, at least not any guy worth keeping.  

Any guy who lets a woman change him from the way he was before simply to suit her desires is a sap.  I dated a girl in college named Christine.  She was all kinds of wrong for me, but I think she stayed with me for six or seven months because it became her personal project to change me from being a “jock” who played, coached, and watched a lot of sports to a more “cultured”, refined man who loved the theatre and wine and cheese parties.  No chance; I am who I am and I didn’t feel like I had to apologize for it to anyone.  I finally wised up and got tired of her act.  The same thing happened with a few subsequent girlfriends post-college as well.  I got really fed up with being made to feel that I was strange or a loser because of what I did for a living or what my passions were in life.  Those girls never lasted with me.  The only one that has lasted has been the only one who never tried to change me, who has always accepted me for who I am and what I love to do, and who has only asked that I accept her in return for being who she is.  Coincidentally enough, it was this same Jennifer who sat next to me at this movie and also hated it, though probably for slightly different reasons than I do.

I hate to get all sappy right now, but it’s 1:30 AM, I am getting up in six hours to go drink beer at the Cask n’ Flagon and then go to the Patriots’ Day game with the aforementioned greatest girlfriend on the planet, so hopefully that will make me feel better about Sox Nation than “Fever Pitch” did.  All I know is that Ben shouldn’t have even bothered with Lindsey as soon as she started to imply that she wanted him to give up something that meant so much to him for so long.  Sure, she jumped down into center field at Fenway to tell him that she changed her mind (another completely improbable scene; the security guards and Boston cops would have floored her faster than Muhammad Ali fighting Glass Joe), but it doesn’t matter.  I wouldn’t be able to trust her.  There are plenty of hot female Sox fans out there who would want to be with Ben from the beginning and wouldn’t have to have some stupid epiphany in which she changes her mind and realizes that she can “deal” with him being a teacher and a diehard Sox fan (not to mention paying $600 to get into the ballpark for one inning).  Good for her, but he should just move on and start dating a female member of the Nation who would appreciate him more.

And that is the #1 reason why I hated “Fever Pitch”: a movie about the Red Sox should never, never, never, never ever make me start thinking about relationships and dating and feelings and all that emotional stuff.  I feel so emasculated just reflecting on it.  Being a Sox fan should be about sports, buddies, beers, tradition, camaraderie, fathers and sons, family, and a release from the real world.  It shouldn’t make me feel like my testicles fell out of their sac and rolled toward the movie screen.  Unfortunately, “Fever Pitch” did just that.  My advice: stay home and watch “Faith Rewarded” or the World Series DVD for the 74th time and leave the emotional, egotistical wallowing in one’s self-pity to Yankees fans.