Say this much for Fever Pitch, the new baseball-themed romantic comedy starring Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore: In its crucial final act, it knows how to take advantage of the unbeatable atmosphere of Fenway Park and the irresistible tale of the 2004 Boston Red Sox. Unfortunately, a movie is not a ballgame, and a stirring ninth inning can't quite redeem 80 minutes of utter blah.
Fallon (pleasant but bland) plays Ben Wrightman, a high-school math teacher and fanatic Red Sox fan who is having difficulty coming to grips with adult life. Barrymore (a little more pleasant, a little less bland) is Lindsay Meeks, a businesswoman flummoxed by Ben's attachment to a team that has not won a World Series since 1918. Fever Pitch is loosely based on a soccer book by Nick Hornby, but here Hornby's prototypical man-boy—whose struggles are well conveyed in such adaptations as High Fidelity and About a Boy—becomes just a boy, with almost no hint of a man. We don't feel Ben's inner struggle because there's no man for the boy to struggle with. What we're left with is standard boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl fare, in which the interesting idea that men love sports because sports made their childhoods tolerable winds up clearly stated but dramatically inert.
The film is directed by the Farrelly brothers, who brought us semen-based hair gel in There's Something About Mary, and who in Fever Pitch have set aside their customary anarchic tone while keeping the grade-school gags. Consider Ben and Lindsay's first date: Ben arrives at Lindsay's door to find her food-poisoned and vomiting liberally. The pair have met just once, but Ben proceeds to walk her to her room, undress her, put her in her pajamas, wash her toilet, and crash on her couch while cuddling her dog. Sound creepy? Lindsay finds it charming. Love is in the air, and there it remains through the baseball-free winter.
Trouble arrives in spring, when Ben's devotion to the Sox undermines his devotion to Lindsay. Through the summer, she tries gamely to accommodate his passions, but come playoff time, Ben finds himself with a choice to make between the love of his childhood and the love of his life. This is heady territory, and if the Farrelly brothers were interested in showing us people with problems rather than archetypes with a plot dilemma, they might have joined the few who have made baseball movies worthy of the game.