Fever Pitch is a film that is so sweet, so charming, so observant, and so entertaining that I wanted to hug it, and kiss it, and take it out on dates to the theater to see other movies just like it. It has been directed by the Farrelly Brothers so it is funny, and it is based on a novel by Nick Hornby, so it is human. I don’t know whom Hornby may have hung out with throughout his life, but after this and two other adaptations (High Fidelity and About a Boy), you’ll be convinced that it was your mother, father, brother, sister, best friend, aunt, uncle, past love, current love, or someone you just saw walking down the street one day when you were in a good mood. These are films about people we know.

Saturday Night Live scene ruiner Jimmy Fallon, bouncing back nicely from the awful Taxi, gives a wonderful performance as Ben, who may be a bit like you, and if he’s not like you, my money says he’s sure like someone that you’ve met before. Ben is a math teacher, and while on a field trip for gifted students, he meets Lindsey Meeks, a businesswoman whom he asks out because his students believe that she would never say yes.

At first Lindsey turns Ben down because she can’t imagine ever being associated with someone who isn’t just like her, “I date poodles.” She tells us. But after lunch with the girls, she decides to give him a shot.

The first date is a disaster; he shows up at her door and attempts small talk while she violently throws up in the bathroom. So he does what any caring man would, puts her to bed, cleans the bathroom, and falls asleep on the couch. There is a wonderful scene when they wake up the next mourning and she asks Ben what is in a bag he is carrying. He tells her that he brought some movies that he likes to watch when he is feeling sick. She likes Annie Hall, “What a coincidence.” He says, pulling out a copy of Roadhouse.

After awhile Lindsey’s friends begin to get suspicious of why such a great guy would be in his thirties and completely single. We find that the reason for this is because Ben has been obsessed with the Boston Red Sox since his uncle took him to a game when he was seven. “Don’t get too attached, they only let you down.” The uncle tells Ben in an opening scene.

The rest of the plot I’ll leave to you, as what happens next is what naturally would happen next. But what the film does with this obsession with baseball and how it juxtaposes that with human love is a small piece of genius filmmaking. What the Farreley’s do is look at Ben’s obsession, not as a bad thing, or a plot device that can be used to break up the couple and than get them back together, but as a crutch for reality. We see that Ben developed his admiration for the team at an early age because life seemed to bail out on him. Therefore he trusts baseball more than feelings because no matter how bad their season is going, the Red Sox will always show up to play their game. If life came with that kind of guarantee, we wouldn’t need baseball at all.

It’s the fact that we develop personal and emotional connections with objects that we begin to develop obsessive behavior. “You love the Sox, but have they ever loved you back?” Asks a wise student of Ben’s.

It’s not that the movie deals with this material that makes it good, but that it deals with it in such a universal way that anyone can relate, because it could happen to anyone. This is a film that knows what it is like to take a walk in the park, have a night out with the boys, have diner with the girls; when the film was over I didn’t feel as though I had just watched a movie, I felt like I had come from a night with friends and family. We don’t watch Ben and Lindsey go to baseball games; we go along with them.

Part of this is due to the screenplay by Lowell Ganz, who also wrote the criminally overlooked Parenthood. What Ganz does is to take Hornby’s love for ordinary people and put it into something that transcends dialogue; these are real people having real conversations about real things. The fact that both Fallon and Barrymore are so naturally likable makes it an even easier sell. Take a scene in which Ben and Lindsey are walking through the park and she hesitates when saying his last name, Fallon’s response is priceless in its quite observation, “You forgot because you and your friends know me as Ben the teacher.”

I’m sure that some will argue that the film’s climax is implausible; no one would ever do what Barrymore does outside of the movies. That may be true, but think about the person who you love the most. I’m sure we’d all like to believe that we would do the exact same if the situation ever arose. A lazy film would have used this climax because it had followed the motions and ended there because the script required it. A good movie will first provide the audience with some sort of grounds to believe that someone would be willing to take such an action before it is actually performed. Fever Pitch is a very good movie.