Fever Pitch is a romantic sports comedy based very loosely on the novel of the same name by Nick Hornby. It stars Jimmy Fallon (Saturday Night Live) and Drew Barrymore and was directed by the Farrelly brothers.
I am a huge Nick Hornby fan and have loved the other Americanized movies based on his previous books. He's the author of such hits as High Fidelity, About A Boy, and now Fever Pitch. This is actually the second movie version of Fever Pitch and is quite different from the original, which was produced in England and more closely follows the novel. You can read my review of the original movie at http://www.epinions.com/content_34310950532
Jimmy Fallon stars as Ben, an advanced mathematics teacher, and Drew Barrymore plays Lindsey, a young executive who is very tied up in her career. The two meet when Ben brings some of his most gifted students on a field trip where Lindsey guides them around her office. After the meeting, Ben takes a chance and asks her out. The relationship slowly blossoms and all seems well until Ben decides to let her in on a little secret. He's a huge Boston Red Sox fan. Fanatical, even. Since it was during the off-season when they met, Lindsey didn't think it would be a big problem. Once season starts, she finds out how wrong she was. The relationship starts having trouble when Ben must choose between baseball or her.
The most interesting thing about this movie is that it was filmed with the real Boston Red Sox team during the same year they went on to win the World Series. The last time they won was in 1918. This movie offers up a bunch of trivia on the history of the team and the dreaded 'Curse of the Bambino', which has to do with the selling of Babe Ruth to another team. In the first half of the movie, you can tell that the story originally intended for the Red Sox to have another losing season because toward the end all the parts about them winning the series seemed kind of thrown in there.
Jimmy Fallon does an excellent job in carrying this movie. The Ben role could have just as easily been played by John Cusack, but he's a Chicago boy and probably wouldn't have wanted to get into the whole Boston thing. Given the success of this film, Fallon finally has the breakout role he needed to put Saturday Night Live behind him and go on to bigger things. Drew Barrymore has made a great career out of romantic movies like this and she looked really great in this one. She's always been a dependable actress and has really made a name for herself in the past several years. The supporting cast is good, but there are no big names other than Ione Skye (Say Anything). She has a few good lines as one of Lindsey's backup crew who she consults several times for girl talk.
This movie was directed by the Farrelly brothers. Yes, the same ones who did Something About Mary and Stuck On You. Believe it or not, they seem to have grown up. In the past, their humor mostly consists of gross or silly jokes but they were very restrained with this movie. There is only one gross vomit scene where Barrymore gets food poisoning and it goes on just a little too long. In a too-silly restaurant scene, Fallon tries to cover his ears while someone at another table talks about a Red Sox game. It was over the top and not that funny.
The closing credits are designed to sound like someone skipping through stations on the radio because there are news tidbits in between the songs. At the end, there is a video clip of some children chanting, "Go Red Sox," but I don't know who they were. It's really not worth sitting through the credits for, even though the music is pretty good.
Despite a few comic mishaps, this is a great movie. It is a romantic comedy about a guy deciding what is more important in his life and the baseball stuff is just a backdrop for that scenario. It was funny how the whole World Series thing just happened to work out like it did, and I'm sure all the superstitious Red Sox fans will love this movie.
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