Shout! Factiry
Movies that require comedians to carry them with their acting skills are always a dicey proposition and one would be forgiven for regarding a character study directed by the writer of The Onion Movie and starring a stand up most famous for bits on Star Wars and KFC as a dicey proposition.
That’s why it’s all the more satisfying that Big Fan, and star Patton Oswalt, actually pull it off.
Oswalt plays Paul Aufiero, a parking garage attendant, whose life revolves around his love for the New York Giants football team. His life consists of a series of rituals with his best friend Sal (Kevin Corrigan), which culminate in weekly visits to the parking lot of MetLife stadium where the two shlubs (who, of course, cannot afford tickets) watch the game on handheld TV.
This weekly devotion is rudely interrupted when the two men happen upon their favorite player Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm), and follow him about town to stops that include a drug deal and a strip club.
They engage with him at the club, but when Paul lets slip that they’ve been following him, Quantrell beats him to the point of hospitalization.
The beating triggers a tragi-comic series of events where Paul’s family are ripped away from him, and when another caller on his favorite sports talk radio station, Philadelphia Phil (Michael Rappaport), identifies him as the fan beaten by Quantrell on the air, Paul finally begins to descend into stalking and violence.
The central question underlying Big Fan is when do the cathartic distractions we have in life overwhelm what we have to do, and become carcinogenic. Paul is a man of some intelligence, and reveals himself to possess great conviction as the story progresses, but he’s in a pathetic state because all the energy that should be directed towards self-fulfillment is expended towards the collective activity of sports fandom.
The film works as more than a cultural punchline because Patton Oswalt finds tremendous nuance in Paul– any fan of sports will see himself in Paul at some moment in the film, though almost none can empathize with his full descent. The film clearly wants us to see Paul as misguided because he’s placed so much energy into an organization that doesn’t care for, or even know him, at the expense of a career, family etc.
However, the more interesting, audacious, interpretation I think, is what kind of society has so underserved Paul that he’s allowed himself to conflate the feeling of reveling in the victory of a sports team with that of actual accomplishment?
Sal, his friend, seems to be a bit more of a cipher and perhaps less tragic than Paul because he has less to offer society as a whole and is simply following his more assertive friend’s lead. Paul, on the other hand, is tested with generational wealth and he rejects it because it would hurt the only thing he genuinely cares about. There’s a strange mixture of pathos and nobility in that, and it’s an indictment of all of us that we have no more use for someone with such steel than a parking garage attendant.
Big Fan is a kind of minor-league (pun intended) version of Taxi Driver, but where implicitly Taxi Driver was asking the audience what kind of men returned from Vietnam and what is left of them, the generation trauma that has created Paul (and Sal, and Paul’s nemesis in Philadelphia, Phil and therefore a whole generation of lonely obsessed men) is not a war or famine or plague.
It’s simple indifference, loneliness, atomization– Paul was presented with a world without guidance and lost himself in a pastime because at least it presented acceptance for its own sake.
Big Fan is a comic thriller with an uneasy eye towards its own target audience– Paul can be pitied, and may be laughed at, but not before we pause at what our own “New York Giants” may be, and whether our own passion projects enrich our lives or, like ivy, threaten to strangle them in the search for sunlight.
Recommended.
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