Metacritique

Dana Stevens’ review of Robert Siegel’s Big Fan is smart but too short. Stevens tosses off glimmering insights in a few words without letting them expand – they’re sparks without kindling.

An example is her description of the movie as an extension of its central character. She writes of Big Fan, “it’s ungainly, imperfect, a bit too self-serious—but so sincere you can’t help rooting for it anyway. Those same adjectives could also be used to describe Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt)[.]” This is kind of like a self-simile, but it’s fuller and subtler. I like the idea that a character’s essence can pervade a movie so that the two become coextensive.

Stevens returns to this thought, again too briefly, later in the review, when she says that the movie uses “digital video that looks appropriately dingy and cheap.” It’s as though Oswalt’s character determines the color and texture of the world around him, the way a bag of tea steeps in clear water.

In the first sentence of her review, Stevens calls Big Fan “a critique of American masculinity,” which was definitely my impression from the trailer, and one of the reasons I’m looking forward to seeing it. But Todd McCarthy, in his Variety review, writes that it’s “unlikely to appeal much to women, non-sports fans and mainstreamers.” This surprised me, and based on the trailer, seems wrong. The movie looks like it’s about sports fans, but not necessarily for them; like Stevens, I’d taken it for a critique of American masculinity through the lens of sports fanaticism, and so I want to know what it has to say.

But Stevens’ review just calls it “a critique,” and drops the issue after that. Maybe that’s for film scholars, not movie reviewers, to explore; but I wish that Stevens didn’t shy from addressing whatever questions the movie raises. There can be fruitful commentary about that stuff for us “mainstreamers” without getting dry and academic.

Maybe the critique is obvious (lonely, insecure men find fraternal community and masculine identity through sports fandom), or is so fundamental to the medium of film that it evades paraphrase. Stevens seems more interested in engaging the movie as a character study, an immersion into one guy’s little world. But here, too, her take is inconsistent.

Stevens criticizes the supporting cast as caricatures, calling them “overdrawn, a gallery of working-class grotesques with spray tans and boob jobs.” If Stevens had fleshed out her suggestion that the aesthetic climate of Big Fan is really an reflection of Paul Aufiero, then she might have argued that these characters are distorted by Paul’s perception of them. Stevens is basically faulting Big Fan for having the filmic equivalent of a novel’s unreliable narrator. This is would be a really exciting interpretation, if Stevens had actually claimed it: it would challenge our assumptions about film-as-factual (the indisputability of “photographic evidence,” etc), and could even help to unpack critique of sports culture that Stevens references but never explains. But by scattering her good ideas without showing readers how they might connect, Stevens frustrates the reader with her own unreliability.