Big Fan
Directed by Robert D. Siegel
Runtime: 86 min.
With Big Fan, screenwriter Robert Siegel’s directorial debut, the schmaltz-meister that wrote The Wrestler shows us that he’s grown leaps and bounds as an artist in the span of just one year. Big Fan tempers the tragic sap of Mickey Rourke’s deadly serious comeback with a healthy dose of acidic, self-loathing humor.
Fan vigorously tears apart the dismal but all-too-relatable life of Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt in a break-out performance), a lonely and more-than-a-little-deranged 36-year-old who lives with his mother and worships the quarterback for the New York Giants with religious fervor. Save for its middling ending—where Siegel uses the purging tears of a sympathetic friend to provide catharsis—the film relies more on Siegel’s admirably unsettling refusal to completely allow us the moral clarity of either hating Paul or pitying him.
No matter how amiable he may seem, Paul’s a loser. Every night, he sputters out pre-scripted speeches for a call-in show that encourages fans to act like proselytizing pro-wrestlers and hype up their teams as if the next game depended on it. When he and his bosom meathead Sal (Kevin Corrigan) spot Giants’ QB Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan, not Jon, Hamm) at a gas station, they follow him. All the way from Staten Island to a strip club in midtown Manhattan. Naturally, because Paul’s fanaticism knows no bounds, it ends up biting him in the ass when his drugged-up, less than jubilant idol freaks out and concusses his adoring public.
The hell that Paul has to undergo after he wakes up from a three-day coma is almost entirely familial in nature and hence that much more comically uncomfortable. Paul’s nagging, soy sauce-hording mother, dimwitted, gold-digging brother and tan, broad-chested sister-in-law continually bait Paul’s unhealthy fanaticism and bring out the squirming humanity out of his regressive egomania. Their cartoonish lack of sympathy forces him to pace with a wounded intensity reminiscent of Mel Blanc’s Henry Chickhenhawk. Paul’s clan showers him in heartfelt hate and he responds in kind with a mania that transforms a petulant man-child into an ineffaceable misanthrope.
Directed by Robert D. Siegel
Runtime: 86 min.
With Big Fan, screenwriter Robert Siegel’s directorial debut, the schmaltz-meister that wrote The Wrestler shows us that he’s grown leaps and bounds as an artist in the span of just one year. Big Fan tempers the tragic sap of Mickey Rourke’s deadly serious comeback with a healthy dose of acidic, self-loathing humor.
Fan vigorously tears apart the dismal but all-too-relatable life of Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt in a break-out performance), a lonely and more-than-a-little-deranged 36-year-old who lives with his mother and worships the quarterback for the New York Giants with religious fervor. Save for its middling ending—where Siegel uses the purging tears of a sympathetic friend to provide catharsis—the film relies more on Siegel’s admirably unsettling refusal to completely allow us the moral clarity of either hating Paul or pitying him.
No matter how amiable he may seem, Paul’s a loser. Every night, he sputters out pre-scripted speeches for a call-in show that encourages fans to act like proselytizing pro-wrestlers and hype up their teams as if the next game depended on it. When he and his bosom meathead Sal (Kevin Corrigan) spot Giants’ QB Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan, not Jon, Hamm) at a gas station, they follow him. All the way from Staten Island to a strip club in midtown Manhattan. Naturally, because Paul’s fanaticism knows no bounds, it ends up biting him in the ass when his drugged-up, less than jubilant idol freaks out and concusses his adoring public.
The hell that Paul has to undergo after he wakes up from a three-day coma is almost entirely familial in nature and hence that much more comically uncomfortable. Paul’s nagging, soy sauce-hording mother, dimwitted, gold-digging brother and tan, broad-chested sister-in-law continually bait Paul’s unhealthy fanaticism and bring out the squirming humanity out of his regressive egomania. Their cartoonish lack of sympathy forces him to pace with a wounded intensity reminiscent of Mel Blanc’s Henry Chickhenhawk. Paul’s clan showers him in heartfelt hate and he responds in kind with a mania that transforms a petulant man-child into an ineffaceable misanthrope.
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