Big Fan

Big Fan

91 minutes

Patton Oswalt is a funny guy. Considering his long apprenticeship in stand-up and supporting roles in sitcoms like The King of Queens, he’s at the very least put in the hours to be considered as such. It’s interesting, then, that at the very moment when his comedy albums and tours are becoming nationally noted, he makes a sideways leap into drama, with Robert D. Siegel’s directorial debut, Big Fan. Siegel, screenwriter for 2008′s acclaimed The Wrestler, presents an Oswalt who’s nothing like the affable, if pointed, schlub we know. Instead, he’s unpleasant, obsessive and thoroughly unlikable. And it works.

Paul Aufiero (Oswalt) is the self-described “world’s biggest New York Giants fan,” the kind of sports fanatic who calls into radio shows with rants that he spends hours composing at his menial parking-attendant job. He lives with his mother and seemingly has no friends other than the similarly Giants-fixated Sal (the ever-reliable Kevin Corrigan). He barely tolerates his family, particularly his personal-injury attorney brother and his secretary-turned-hideously fake-tanned wife. Paul and Sal spend game days cheering on their team (from the parking lot of Giants Stadium) and nitpicking over schedules and conceptual wins and losses. That is, until they randomly spot Paul’s hero, Giants quarterback Quantrell Bishop at a gas station and decide to follow/stalk him. Things don’t turn out well, to put it mildly.

For much of the rest of Big Fan, little happens. Paul slowly deals with the savage beating he receives from Bishop, or rather, refuses to deal with it. He contends with “Philadelphia Phil,” his on-air nemesis and arch-Eagles fan, eventually to a disturbingly plausible climax. This is a portrait of a deeply disturbed individual, one that refuses to take the easy outs that many similar films have. Paul may be pathetic, but he rebuffs (rudely, for the most part) any attempts to draw him out or to better his station. In one telling scene, his mother (Marcia Jean Kurtz) berates him for refusing a career or family, claiming that everyone considers those basic necessities; Paul’s screamed response is more indicative of his character than any cheap reveal would be. I was reminded continually of 2002′s One Hour Photo, a similar film of an obsessive; however while that film let me down with a pat, simple excuse for the deep maladjustment of its central character, Big Fan does not. It’s simple and true message? Some people are just fucked up inside. They have room in their lives for only one love, as arbitrary or strange as it may seem to others. There aren’t rational reasons for everything.

Big Fan is almost certainly guaranteed to be a breakthrough for Oswalt. By turns hideously unlikable and easily sympathetic, his turn as Paul is nothing short of revelatory. He plays the character as spiteful and indecisive, so secure in his tiny world that it’s terribly tempting to ignore his profound alienation. Paul is a true grotesque- he does not attract, he fascinates. Siegel does not paint him or his surroundings kindly; the lighting is always washed out, the cheap squalor of his life emphasized through starkness, not exaggeration. The simple sadness of a grown man’s bedroom festooned with sports statistics and a giant poster of a football QB above his bed does more than any interior monologue or grand speech could. Similarly, the emphasis the camera places on Paul’s unshaven cheeks or his slovenly eating is so honest as to be unkind. As Sal, Corrigan is somewhat relegated to the kind of slightly slimy, bewildered type that he plays perfectly, but as always plays it well. Someone should get on with finding him his own Big Fan or The Wrestler, as he’s earned it.

More than any other film, I thought of Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ’66, which also dealt with unlikable obsessives gifted at a single thing. The grimy colors and unrelenting bitterness form the core of the pair; both build to a slow and calamitously violent ending. But where Buffalo ’66 ultimately became a redemptive explanation of Billy Brown’s behavior, Paul gets no favors from anyone, not even himself. The only ray of light at the end of Big Fan is tainted with deep denial, and is all the more striking and powerful for that. Oswalt and Siegel should be proud. To paraphrase the film, it’s going to be a good year for them.

by Nathan Kamal