Big Fan
For a guy who’s moved from writing comedy to drama, former Onion senior editor Robert D. Siegel hasn’t shown a lot of range. Like his last script, The Wrestler (let’s kindly ignore his credit on The Onion Movie), Big Fan concerns an outcast struggling to maintain a collapsing status quo. It also features a revelatory lead performance, an impressively introspective and ham-free dramatic performance by ace comic Patton Oswalt. And it climaxes with a moment of self-martyrdom few would be brave or crazy enough to follow through. Siegel seems particularly taken with 1976 cinema; consider Big Fan the Taxi Driver to The Wrestler’s Rocky.
Oswalt parlays his boundless enthusiasm into the character of Paul Auferio, a late-thirties New York Giants fan who works a shitty job, lives with his mom and lives only for his team, who he rants about as a regular on a local sports radio station. Events conspire so that he gets drunkenly beaten up by one of his favorite Giants (Jonathan Hamm—not, alas, Don Draper). Awakening from a coma days later, he’s surrounded by family members who expect him to squeal to the police or press charges. Instead, he remains a stick-in-the-mud, turning his attention instead to a loud-mouthed Eagles fan (Michael Rapaport with a questionable South Philly accent).
Like The Wrestler, Big Fan attempts to take a neatly structured screenplay and fill it with the dignity of its convictions. It doesn’t work quite so well this time, and not only because Siegel, directing-wise, is so not a Darren Aronofsky. Oswalt isn’t a Mickey Rourke, for that matter, but he’s excellent all the same, chiefly because he doesn’t play him as a pathetic loser. The inspired twist is that Oswalt’s Paul Auferio likes the way he lives; apart from a mom (Marcia Jean Kurtz) who occasionally brings up his ’bating habits, he firmly believes that he has it pretty good, a position from which he will not budge an inch.
Siegel’s decision to make us think he’s capable of Travis Bickle-esque bloodshed leads to a questionable finale, a too-pat capper to a film that never quite transcends the pre-processed script à la The Wrestler. But when we’re simply hanging with Oswalt working on his radio routine, it feels just right. B-
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