Movie review: Big Fan

by Peter Simek of Renegade Bus

Big Fan, the second film written and first directed by former Onion editor-in-chief Robert Siegel (The Wrestler) couldn’t open during a better time of the year. The next month brings sports fans’ autumn bliss, that glorious time of the year when the opening of the professional and college football seasons overlap with baseball’s pennant races and the World Series. It is a fantastic season for fanatics, when wives wonder where Sundays have gone and some disinterested intellectual types ask, “what’s this all about?”

Sport takes place in the periphery of Siegel’s film, but it is hard to think of a film that makes such a convincing, albeit offhanded, case for the value of sport.

Big Fan is a character study, hard focused on Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt), a rabid New York Giants fan from Staten Island. Aufiero lives with his mother, watches Giants home games with his buddy Sal (Kevin Corrigan) on a tiny TV hooked up to his car battery in the Meadowlands parking lot, and enjoys pseudo-celebrity and popular relevance as a late night frequent caller to a local sports radio call-in show modeled after New York’s WFAN, the godfather of the genre of station that includes Dallas’ The Ticket.

Aufiero, known by the moniker “Paul from Staten Island,” offers more passion than insight into the game. But it is his unflinching, chest-beating Giants bravado that wins him fans over the airwaves.

If Paul from Staten Island had it his way, that would be the extent of his life. But his family – his nagging mother (Marcia Jean Kurtz), his grease-ball older brother Jeff (Gino Cafarelli) – represents normal life intruding in on Paul’s small, if contented existence. They reprimand him about his job (he works as a parking lot attendant), his lack of a love life (not surprising), and his seeming inability to grow-up and lead a normal life – read: marry and have kids, a respectable job, and a house – the cardinal values of suburbia.

It all comes to head when Paul and Sal happen upon Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm), the Giants’ star linebacker, at a pizza place and decide to trail him. But the innocent, star-struck game turns ugly. A coked-up, half-drunk Bishop ends up beating Paul near the point of death, and the fanatic from Staten Island finds himself in the middle of a high-profile scandal. Paul’s hero, Bishop, is sidelined and under investigation, and the Giants start to lose every Sunday, sliding out of playoff contention. Paul is caught between his love of the Giants and the pressures of his family, who want him to sue and press charges. Paul won’t do it.

Paul’s resistance to his family and the police investigation shows surprising courage in the little man. While fanaticism for sport is often dismissed as a pass-time or a distraction, in Siegel’s film it is Paul’s only love. Sport defines him, but in the context of the world around him, defined by status, class, or assumptions of normality, sport seems no more ridiculous a life-lending meaning than any of the other imagined identities that define the world of Staten Island – or Long Island, for that matter, where Siegel grew up. Big Fan unexpectedly raises the love of sport to the realm of noble action – not mere amusement, but an arena of real human drama. His loyalty to the Giants betrays a largeness of character in the big fan that transcends the fact that it rests on his devotion to game.

With his directorial debut, Siegel has shown that his success with the screenplay for The Wrestler (2008) was no fluke. Siegel has a careful cinematic voice, a light touch with off-beat characters that has now produced two deep-delving character studies of everyman-misfits. In a phone conversation with Renegade Bus, Siegel said the script for Big Fan was floating around for years with interest from a number of directors (including Darren Aronofsky), but the decision to make the film himself seems to have been a good choice. Siegel’s directorial approach is straight-forward, his camera stays tightly focused on Paul, and he allows the script to drive the story.

Though not likely to receive the laurels Mickey Rourke brought in for The Wrestler, Big Fan may be a finer film. It shows Siegel’s expanding vision, a new cinematic voice worth keeping an eye on.