One more hour to go, and it looks like I’m going to miss my reading target by two titles. I would have done just enough, but Karin, Daniel, Samuel, and I were invited out to dinner. This occupied us for six hours.
I am going to be dismayed all year.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Here is this month’s movie review. I expected that it would be on the short side, but it ended up being rather long and tangled.
Fever Pitch
No, I don’t mean the 2005 Farrelly Bros. movie with Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, which uses the sport of baseball as its window-dressing. I mean the movie it copies. The one based on Nick Hornby’s book.
The movie with soccer as its window-dressing.
There’s very little
soccer in it. As I’ll explain, that’s kind of the point.
Colin Firth and Ruth Gemmell play nice-looking young schoolteachers. She’s very strict and professional and serious. He spends most of his day thinking about Arsenal F.C.
They get on each other’s nerves.
She wonders what makes him tick. He wonders if Arsenal will win the League.
One evening, he drives her home.
She asks if he wants to come upstairs, for some tea; and then, if he wants to stay the night.
It’s not like he hasn’t noticed her, but he stumbles into this relationship without trying to.
She has to
will herself into it, with enough trepidation and determination for them both.
I suppose the movie is on his side. I certainly was, while I was watching it.
Karin was on Ruth Gemmell’s side.
He’s behaving like an idiot, Karin said.
She’s the idiot, I said.
This was some weeks ago. In hindsight, I think the Ruth Gemmell character comes off better than the Colin Firth character (though her motives also are questionable). She may expect too much of him, but he expects shockingly little of her; and yet, he ends up getting his way.
This is one of those movies in which the outcome is perfunctory, and what is more interesting is the underlying philosophical dispute.
It is expressed in this bit of dialog:
“It’s only a game,” Ruth Gemmell complains.
“Don’t say that,” Colin Firth tells her:
Please! That is the worst, most stupid thing anyone could say! ’Cause it quite clearly isn’t “only a game.” I mean if it was do you honestly think I’d care this much? Eh? Eighteen years! Eight-teen years! Do you know what you wanted eighteen years ago? Or ten? Or five? Did you want to be Head of Year at North London Comprehensive? I doubt it. I’d doubt if you wanted anything for that long. … I mean I don’t care what it is, a car, a job, an Oscar, the baby … then you’d understand how I was feeling tonight. But there isn’t, and you don’t, so …
There isn’t anything that I’ve wanted for eighteen years [Ruth Gemmell says], ’cause I was a kid eighteen years ago. And if I did still want the same things I’d think I’d gone wrong somewhere, because actually I don’t want to marry David Cassidy, I don’t want bigger tits, I don’t want to do better on my mock-Os. I’ve stopped worrying about that kind of thing and maybe you should try.
Well [he retorts], maybe there’s a big bit of you that’s gone missing somewhere; maybe everyone should want something they’ve always wanted.
His view is that having an object of lifelong loyalty of
whatever sort – even one as trivial as a soccer club – is better than not having an object of lifelong loyalty at all.
In other words, lifelong loyalty, regardless of its object, is
good in itself.
This is an interesting proposition, but, ultimately, I think it is not supported.
The intrinsic value of the thing would seem to matter to whether lifelong loyalty to the thing is worthwhile.
The movie goes out of its way to point out that Colin Firth doesn’t assume that there is any intrinsic value in Arsenal F.C. He doesn’t even really
watch the games, despite all the time and thought he devotes to the club. When he’s in the stadium, he’s too busy chanting and jumping up and down to follow the action; and when he’s at home, he’s too skittish to stay put in front of the TV.
The Colin Firth character is the guy who isn’t in love with a
beloved – not even a soccer club – so much as with
being in love.
The Ruth Gemmell character perceives this, and she is so irritated by it, she tries to will him out of it.
Either she is a person of tremendous, monomaniacal will; or Colin Firth’s looks and charm are irresistible to her.
Or some combination of these things.
But both these things, arguably, are more substantial, more admirable, than the empty pretend-fanaticism of Colin Firth.
There is another possibility, which is that she, too, is in love with being in love; and that the reason she chooses the empty Colin Firth character as the ostensible object of her love is that she perceives that
he is in love with being in love. If she can get him to love
her, then she “repairs” him; therefore, symbolically, projectively, she “repairs” herself; she “fills up” the hole in the center of
her being.
This, ultimately, is self-centered; but at least there is a
person – herself – at the center of this concern. It’s better than
only being in love with being in love.
It must be said that Gemmell and, especially, Firth are lovely to watch. The movie is pleasing enough; it overcomes the problem that these characters are (nearly) empty inside. Here are two attractive people who are not on the same page and dearly want to be on the same page (or, at least, the Gemmell character wants this, and, probably, in some dim, reptilian way, the Firth character does, too). It would seem that this is a classic case of “opposites attract.” But this is not enough for a relationship to be a success.
If my foregoing diagnosis of their motives is correct, however, then there is actually a pretty striking affinity between these characters.
