Big Fan (2009)

What a time to watch the dark comedy “Big Fan.” It follows an obsessed and unhinged New York sports fan with no life outside of rooting for his home team and dumping on the city he loathes: Philadelphia.

This isn’t baseball, though. It’s football. And Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt) is a mid-30s parking deck attendant who only lives and breathes for his New York Giants with no cares for women, family or career. His bedroom walls are adorned with a poster of his idol -- the Giants lead QB (Jonathan Hamm). Paul sleeps -- and jerks off -- under a football-themed blanket from childhood. He scribbles fifth-grade-level “slams” into a notebook that he’ll later use for “impromptu” late-night calls to his favorite radio sports chat show. Flag on the play, he’s about to pop.

I won’t divulge writer-director Robert Siegel’s hilarious, creepy and strangely fascinating story, except to say that this filmmaker plays off the audience’s knowledge of “Taxi Driver” and “King of Comedy” – the loner obsessive finally snapping. The ending perfectly fits Paul, even as it slyly undermines audience expectation. A hint: Paul paints his face green and white in the City of Brother Love, wincing as he applies the makeup. Priceless.

Siegel knows his sports fan territory – he’s listened to the sports chat shows and seen the worshipful fans camped outside a stadium watching a game on TV because they can’t cop tickets. If you’ve lived in a sports town – and I have in Philly and Tuscaloosa – you know two or a dozen Pauls, the dream fan who’s made himself a slave to what he loves.

I wish Siegel had laid off the tired New Yawk stereotypes (the over-bearing mother, the older brother who’s an ambulance chasing lawyer with the crass wife) that heavily grate, having delivered a true-to-life screenplay about south New Jersey in “The Wrestler.” These play as well as any Southern barn dance stereotype in, say, “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Oswalt, permanently scarring any memory of his work in “Ratatouille,” brilliantly portrays a pathetic obsessive who sees nothing wrong with his life, lived under a child’s blanket, one ear to the radio, one hand down there, looking up at the poster image of the man he wishes he could be. B+