DVD Roundup: Big Fan

Robert Siegel, who wrote The Wrestler and is the writer/director of Big Fan has a very specific vision for his films. He takes tragic archetypes from past eras of film history that you don't see in movies that much anymore, and implants them in the media-saturated post-modern reality of 21st century strip mall America. Randy "the Ram" Robinson from The Wrestler is an updated version of every broken-down palooka from every boxing movie made back when people gave a damn about boxing. He's Anthony Quinn in Requiem for a Heavyweight, and Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront and Wallace Beery AND Jon Voight in the two versions of The Champ. Of course, boxing hasn't been culturally relevant since Rocky beat Ivan Drago, so Siegel's version of the character is a mashed-up veteran of one of the violent, contrived spectacles that has partially supplanted boxing in American culture: professional wrestling. Paul Aufiero, the desperately pathetic protagonist of Big Fan is another recognizable character type from a different golden age of cinema: he's the obsessive, anti-social loner that skulked his way through theaters in the 70s, a character that Martin Scorsese used to specialize in. He's Travis Bickle for the current moment. While Travis Bickle's maladjustment was signaled by his complete alienation from popular culture, Aufiero's abnormality is fueled by a full-body immersion in pop culture, or at least a small corner of it.

Paul is a New York Giants fan, to the exclusion of everything else in his life. It's understandable: he works at a hospital parking garage, he lives with his hectoring mother, he has only one friend, who he only relates to by talking about and watching the Giants. His only moments of true joy and self-expression are watching the Giants win and calling in to a local sports talk radio show with meticulously crafted bits of generic boosterism. Unlike Travis Bickle, who was tormented by his yearning for normality, Paul has no interest in connecting with the rest of the world or anyone in it. He's got the Giants, and that's enough. When he gets into a strip club fracas with his favorite player that results in the player's suspension and a Giants' tailspin, Paul loses his only source of enjoyment in life and his very identity. Paul sees himself as a part of the Giants team, and sees his talk radio monologues as integral to their success. Overnight, he has to process the notion that he's responsible for his team's failure. This puts him into a freefall that leads to a predictably-70s style resolution.

But just as The Wrestler took a stale plot skeleton and invested it with vibrant life, Big Fan tells the familiar story of an imploding loser with an attention to detail that makes it all feel fresh. Paul is played by the brilliant stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt, who brings a raw, anguished vulnerability to the role. His Paul is passionate but dead-eyed, filled to the brim with love for his team and a desire to express it, but limited by his child-like inarticulateness. His life is filled with a parade of grotesques and Bridge and Tunnel stereotypes, all of whom he works diligently to avoid in favor of the imagined world where he is the ever-spinning engine powering the New York Football Giants to victory. His journey to resolving the identity crisis created by his beating never strays too far from formula, but it does flow from his wounded character, and the ending provides a couple of moments of genuine surprise and a coda that's simultaneously funny and deeply sad. Siegel's movies have so far made up for their familiar structures by bringing old archetypes into a new era and using that juxtoposition to generate thoughtful observations about the ever-changing cultural context of American life. I'm looking forward to Siegel's next reimagination of a classic film trope.