by: Anghus Houvouras

BIG FAN
Length: 102 minutes
Director: Robert Siegel
Thursday, November 12, 10:45-11:59pm
Lumina Theater

There are very few things I find myself obsessing over. Football is one of them. I’m the guy who meanders aimlessly through the world from the time the Pro-Bowl ends until pre-season starts in late August. I started watching football at an early age, thanks to my father. And like my father, I carried on the tradition of becoming the guy who yelled at the television, and constructed sentences composed only of obscenities and the name of a player on my team.

The definition of “football-obsessed” has changed in recent years. There are those who take the game of football to a sad and desperate place. Fantasy Football has become a cottage industry for people grasping to try to make football more about themselves. And there are others who are so tied up in the agony of defeat of the game that they suffer as much, if not more so, than those who play the game.

Big Fan takes a look at the trite and lonely life of Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt), a die-hard Giants fan. Everything revolves around the team. His nights are spent manning the exit gate of a parking deck, listening to sports-talk radio. He composes his thoughts with paper and pen before calling every night to praise his team and, more importantly, denounce their conference rivals, the Philadelphia Eagles. His onair nemesis Philadelphia Phil (Michael Rappaport) is an equally loud-mouthed ass who taunts Paul when the season begins to go sour for the Giants.

Paul’s life is one that no one would envy. He has a nowhere job, a family that thinks he’s as a failure, and an unyielding devotion to a team he can’t even afford tickets to see. None of that matters. The only thing in his life capable of bringing him pleasure are the Giants. This unhealthy obsession is personified in his favorite player Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm). While not exactly a man-crush, his fixation on Bishop is awkward. To see a man in his 30s with the poster of a football player on his wall creates a particularly creepy psychological portrait of Paul. His obsession is confronted when he spots Bishop at a gas station and follows him all the way to a strip club. When he finally tries to engage Bishop in conversation, an awkward exchange soon turns into a rage-fueled beating. Paul is practically beaten to death by the player he idolizes in a misunderstanding about his intentions.

For Paul’s family this is the wake-up call they’ve been waiting for. His brother, a personal injury lawyer, sees this as a winning lottery ticket. But Paul wants nothing to do with it. Bishop gets suspended, and Paul has to bear the burden of watching his team suffer. Despite the reality of the situation, Paul feels guilty. Unfortunately, he can’t just walk away, hounded by a police detective, seeking to make a case against Bishop, and the press who is quick to turn this into a story. But Paul’s only allegiance is to the Giants.

Patton Oswalt plays Paul to perfection: a lonely man who exists in a lonely world, living with his mother, his sexual encounters all coming courtesy of a bottle of hand lotion. The emptiness and desperation is so vividly painted on camera by the director, Robert Siegel (former editor-in-chief of The Onion and writer of The Wrestler). We can’t help but pity Paul, even though his actions defy any sense of logic.

The movie starts out right near the bottom of the barrel and soon plummets to emotional depths very few films are willing to go. There were moments when the movie almost became too dark for me. I was half convinced I had the entire plot and story arc for Paul figured out. But there’s a fantastic third-act switcheroo—a fourth quarter creative Hail Mary that saves Big Fan from becoming just another dark independent film.

The movie is a powerful character study about a guy who lacks perspective—someone whose identity is tied into a world over which he has no control. What makes Paul a great character is how blind he is to the painful realities. In spite of common sense, he is able to reconcile his world view with absolute certainty. Like many great protagonists, he is blissfully unaware of the path he is on, even when everyone else sees the end coming. And speaking of endings: It’s a doozy.

What I liked most about Big Fan is how accessible it is. This is the kind of film-festival movie that can be appreciated by the indie-loving art-house film crowd as well as the mainstream cinephile. Good movies know no boundaries, and Big Fan is a film worth rooting for.