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PLOT: A tightly-wound female executive thinks she's met the ideal man. His flaw, however, is that he's a Red Sox season ticketholder who eats, sleeps, lives and breathes "his" team.
What were the odds that the guys who launched their careers with Dumb And Dumber would give us one of the funniest, smartest date movies in years?
About the same odds, I'm guessing, that you'd have been given last spring on the Red Sox winning the World Series.
Fever Pitch is that movie, a spot-on Americanization (shot in Toronto) of Nick Hornby's novel about a woman who falls for a lunatic soccer fan. This version replaces footie with baseball, Red Sox fans -- prior to their curse-breaking Series win -- being the consummate lost-cause followers, passionate souls who'd all but flog themselves in their devotion to their born-to-lose ballclub.
More importantly -- though there are plenty of women sports fans -- sports tends to be a lingua franca of men, one that's used here as a springboard for a depiction of absurd gender differences, in much the same way that Hornby's High Fidelity used music.
One party scene in Fever Pitch says it all. In one room, ultra-achieving executrix Lindsay is trading notes with all her girlfriends about her new guy Ben (whom they've just met and pleasantly analyzed like Mr. Spock with a tri-corder). The consensus: He's too good to be true, there has to be a hidden, monstrous flaw.
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In the next room, the yuppie males -- who'd initially been a bit cool to the newcomer -- have discovered that Ben (Jimmy Fallon) has Sox season tickets right behind home plate. They've now encircled him like adoring tribesmen around their new leader.
The flaw, of course, is that Ben is a sports fanatic. Not a sane one like you and me, the extent of whose addiction is that we may be forced to explain (or would if there weren't a lockout) why a Leafs playoff game is more important than the season finale of Desperate Housewives. To Ben, every single Red Sox game is a Leaf's playoff game. His apartment is bedecked in Sox logo'ed merchandise, the only aberration being his Yankees toilet paper.
Unlike High Fidelity (which in the end was still a male's perspective) Ben's and Lindsay's stories are parcelled out so equally that they even have the same number of friends/bosom buddies.
The cast is full of solidly-pro seldom-seen-anymore character actors (James B. Sikking, Ione Skye, JoBeth Williams) and even fate seemed to conspire to give the movie a neat ending (albeit a hastily rewritten one after the Sox pulled out their miracle last fall). And Barrymore and Fallon hit exactly the right notes (his shy-doofus persona actually fits here, as opposed to, say, in the horrific cop flick Taxi).
For the most part, Fever Pitch manages to avoid predictable romantic-comedy antics in favour of character development -- save for the end, when the zany desperate-act-in-a-crowded-place gambit gets played out for the 100th time in a romantic comedy.
And by this time, the movie has scored so heavily with you and your date, it's easy to forgive a schlocky moment or two.
(This film is rated PG)