Fever Pitch (dir. David Evans, 1997) — Review

Fever Pitch, an unholy hybrid of the sports movie and the ‘90s romcom, grafts together its two genres with the powerful glue of tribalistic resentment. Very loosely based on Nick Hornby’s autobiographical essay collection, the film swaps out a modest authorly tone for the ultimate ‘North London Waitrose dad’ fantasy — one which, like football, operates by painting one party as the enemy, despite pretensions to the contrary. For all the outward charm of a floppy-haired, Byron-waffling Colin Firth, Fever Pitch pulses with the seething resentment of the modern man-child; mapping the stroppy, combative nature of football fandom onto the rigid beats of the screwball comedy, the film is a reminder of the joy of petty hatred.

The premise is simple enough: dyed-in-the-wool Arsenal fan Paul Ashworth (Firth) lives a luxuriously boring life as an English teacher at a North London comp — until a dalliance with new coworker Sarah Hughes (Ruth Gemmell) bollocks it all up. Forced to confront the fact that there are other things in life beyond football, Paul and his other repressed Englishmen tussle with this issue for nearly two hours, before, obviously, he reforms. On the surface, this is a victory for the beleaguered Sarah, who’s rocked the boat by asking the absolute bare minimum of an adult man. And yet the world depicted in Fever Pitch has receded into a distant utopia: a paradise where two state school teachers can… buy a house… in central London.

In some ways, Fever Pitch has accidentally aged into a love letter to the good old days when a mediocre, straight white man could just be boring, immature, and prosperous. I came away completely on his side.

The rom-com of this era basically works like a football game: to succeed both financially and as an experience, it must evoke a mixture of spite and adoration which gets the viewer emotionally invested. A large part of this comes from assigning blame. These forms of watered-down warfare thrive on resentment, often irrational, unapologetically partisan. And despite her ultimate victory, Sarah’s main contribution to the film is to stir the kind of head-grabbing, bellowing rebuke that her male companions spew at the TV.

Paul, the Ur-schlub, is what might be termed in modern parlance a ‘walking red flag’, engineered by the screenwriter (unsurprisingly also the author of the autobiography) to come across as incompetent but blameless. The film breaks out all the middle-class sob story classics to justify his emotional reliance on football: divorced parents, semi-absent dad, generally boring life. His bromance with quaint Cockney Arsenal fan Steve (Mark Strong) sums up the film’s pitch: in an era of gender roles which constricted men as well as women, football offers the sole outlet of joy, passion, and love for a whole swathe of the population. In contrast, Sarah and her roommate Jo (Holly Aird) come across as a pair of screeching harpies, quite literally breaking up the love-in between Paul, his team, and his ‘lads’.

Sarah’s expectations are, again, incredibly basic: she wants her chain-smoking, pint-swilling, pseudo-intellectual squeeze to stop throwing tantrums at the TV and make plans with her a few days in advance. Jo, forced to voice the thoughts of any reasonable, right-minded viewer, sounds like a vindictive shrew, claiming that men’s enthusiasm for football is a form of “colonization”. (Sarah’s nearly getting crushed to death at a game, by the way, is swiftly glossed over.) “I’ve been impregnated by a twelve year old”, Sarah sighs over dinner with an increasingly delusional, self-aggrandising Paul. And whose fault, as the headteacher asks, is that? Persistently chasing after said twelve year old for the entire film, unfortunately Sarah, and her ultimate ‘victory’, seem hollow and somehow false. Paul, it’s claimed, is deluded for thinking that Arsenal Football Club will ever ‘love him back’ — at least he hasn’t chosen to have a baby with it.