Up the Middle

debased: Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore get game.

Fever Pitch turns a hanging curve into a meatball.

by Cindy Fuchs

You never thought you'd feel nostalgic for the hair gel joke. But against the sheer banality of the Farrellys' new movie, Ben Stiller's mispronunciation of Brett Favre's name looks like comic genius. Though it's based on a Nick Hornby novel (and adapted once already, in 1997, as a Colin Firth movie), Fever Pitch trots out the usual Farrelly formula — beautiful if confused girl, earnest if demented boy, supportive if slightly oddball community — in its most watered-down version yet. This time, the mismatched couple is workaholic/spin class devotee Lindsey (fearless Drew Barrymore) and hardcore Red Sox fan Ben (Jimmy Fallon). He's also a math teacher, which suggests his appreciation for numbers, though the pre-2004 stats for the Sox could hardly have been pleasant to mull over. Ben's career is only a means to have him meet Lindsey; by and large, he's reduced to an assortment of Red Sox paraphernalia — shower curtain, posters, underwear, wall shrine — each close-up as uninspired as the one before.

While the movie's central relationship is between Ben and his team, Lindsey makes mighty efforts to accommodate his obsession, going to games, hanging with his equally fixated friends, scheduling her life around his "previous commitments" (spring training, home and away games). But the movie has little to do except replay the problem: the box seat "family" is tedious, the ups and downs of winning and losing repetitive, and the conflicts between the lovers predictable.

As Lindsey comes to understand the scope of her problem — she's dating two different guys, Winter Ben and Summer Ben — Fever Pitch almost makes a point about compromise and generosity in romance. But it also poses questions to which you already know the answers: Will she put up with his passionate devotion? Will he grow up? Will Ben Affleck make his rumored cameo appearance?

Though Lindsey discusses her odd arrangements with her married girlfriends (KaDee Strickland, Marissa Jaret Winokur and Ione Skye, who should just star in her own movie already), their responses are as banal as hers. If only someone could help Ben realize that he's behaving childishly or Lindsey that spending her off hours (and sometimes work hours as well) at Fenway is more codependent than supportive. The film does suggest that maybe his devotion to a team (that "doesn't love him back") is a kind of addiction, and yes, so is her careerist sublimation. But this matters little when, in the grander scheme, the Sox really do achieve the most crushing comeback in playoffs history and win the Series (the screenplay was revised last October).

Where the novel (and the 1997 adaptation) was mostly concerned with sports love, this film can't help but be about Barrymore, and not only because she produced it. Her sustained energy, bright and precise as usual, makes the film's ostensible boy story seem all too familiar and feeble.

Fever Pitch Directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly A Fox release Opens Friday at area theaters