THE FAN
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Robert DeNiro, Wesley Snipes, John Leguizamo, Benicio Del Toro, Ellen Barkin. Screenplay: Phoef Sutton. Director: Tony Scott. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Quick, match the psychotic Robert DeNiro character to the film in which he appears: 1) Travis Bickle...all right, that was a gimme. How about Max Cady? Or Rupert Pupkin? It seems that DeNiro has played an inordinate number of nut cases, but each one has been a distinct creation. It also seems less than coincidental that all of the aforementioned roles -- in TAXI DRIVER, CAPE FEAR and THE KING OF COMEDY, respectively -- were directed by Martin Scorsese. Scorsese knows DeNiro well enough, and has enough talent, to refuse to let him lapse into self-parody. Tony Scott, on both counts, does not. THE FAN is an piece of hack work in which everyone involved flounders in a pointless story made even more intolerable by Scott's oppressive atmospheric theatrics.
DeNiro plays Gil Renard, a divorced hunting supplies salesman and life-long San Francisco Giants fan. Gil is particularly excited about the upcoming season, because the Giants have signed reigning league MVP Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes) as a free agent to join established team star Juan Primo (Benicio Del Toro). Unfortunately, Gil is a bit _too_ devoted to baseball; in fact, he is an unhinged obsessive, and when he loses both his job and visitation rights with his son, he buries himself even deeper in the game. When Rayburn goes into a prolonged slump, Gil begins to feel that there is a connection between them, and decides to take action to help him. That action does end up connecting the two men, a connection which doesn't make Rayburn too thrilled about getting up close and personal with his fans.
It saddens me to announce the return of the Tony Scott responsible for DAYS OF THUNDER and BEVERLY HILLS COP II after a brief hiatus during which he channeled brother Ridley to produce the tense and claustrophobic CRIMSON TIDE. This is the Tony Scott who has ingested the Simpson/Bruckheimer visual motif to such an extent that he seems medically dependent on the kind of lighting which makes everyone in the film look like George Hamilton; this is the Tony Scott whom one suspects might never have been able to set up a shot he liked if blinds had not been invented. Scott is a director who generally takes a script, actors and solid production values and grinds them into hamburger to be smothered in slow motion and a spirit-crushing soundtrack. Whatever substance their might have been in the story of THE FAN is rendered toxic by contact with Scott's "vision." This is an ugly, ugly film.
There is no great challenge involved in figuring out what the psychological underpinnings of this story were supposed to be, and that they might actually have made a decent film in some alternate reality. We are meant to see Gil as a beaten-down Everyman whose desire for a life where he is noticed drives him to an ultimately violent fascination with the celebrity he idolizes, sort of a hybrid of Willie Lohman and Charles Manson. But the sympathetic side of Gil never comes through -- he is frightening and crazy when we meet him, and it is obvious that he has been frightening and crazy for some time from the reactions of his boss and ex-wife. Bobby Rayburn is sane, but screenwriter Phoef Sutton fumbles any development in his character. The arrogant but superstitious superstar has a life which parallels Gil's in ways so obvious that you can feel the elbow in your ribs -- a divorce, a young son, a perfectionist streak driven by their fathers, etc. -- but beyond those bits of trivia there is nothing to him. Wesley Snipes looks leaden most of the time, trying to find some kind of emotional core which just isn't there, and Scott's direction steadfastly refuses to allow him the faintest hope of doing so.
Snipes is in trouble from the start with a character who makes no sense, but at least you might hope for some creative lunacy from DeNiro. Sadly, what emerges instead is a performance which slaps together pieces of his superior work for Scorsese. Like Travis Bickle, he is a loner lacking social skills living a kind of double life; like Rupert Pupkin, he uses his idol to get his shot at fame; like Max Cady, he is violent and uses the child of his nemesis to get even. In the twenty years since TAXI DRIVER, everyone who fancies himself an impressionist has done a lazy DeNiro impression by squinting and rasping, "You talkin' to _me_?" It's depressing to see DeNiro doing his own impression of himself.
THE FAN is the kind of film which makes me angry enough to point out idiotic inconsistencies like overhead shots of Candlestick (now 3-Com) Park which obviously were taken at 49er games, but the fact is that I don't need to. It is a film lacking a single character with whom to identify, without a single shot which doesn't remind you that its director cares more about the filter he has chosen than he does about his characters. That's right, Tony Scott...I'm talkin' to _you_.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 fan depreciation days: 1.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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