Nog and Big Fan

Robert Siegel's directorial debut (he recently wrote The Wrestler) is very dark, very funny, and maybe most of all, very sad. Patton Oswalt, the super-sharp stand-up comedian, plays Paul, a tollbooth operator who spends his days at work composing and practicing praises to the New York Giants which he later reads on a late-night sports-talk radio program (calling from his bedroom in a house he shares with his mother). During those few minutes on the show, Paul is well-known and well-liked: he becomes "Paul from Staten Island," a devoted, unfailingly optimistic Giants fan. During the rest of his life, he's just a lonely single guy whose life revolves around studying the team and their games, which he and his friend Sal watch on a small television outside the stadium (presumably they cannot afford tickets, yet find the proximity of the team and stadium essential: it's their version of a religious pilgrimage to the temple). The film's plot is set in motion when Paul and Sal happen to spot the Giants' quarterback in their neighborhood and creepily tail him to a strip club, where their starstruck effort to meet him turns into a scuffle that ends up having a huge bearing on the Giants' season and turns "Paul from Staten Island" into persona non grata among the Giants' faithful after his role in the scuffle is exposed on-air by "Philadelphia Phil," a similarly obsessive Eagles fan. The last act involves a real-life meeting at a bar between an increasingly-desperate Paul and his now arch-rival, Phil: it's a wonderfully played scene where the film could spin in any number of different directions but then chooses one you may not expect but yet, the more I reflect, is perfectly true to its characters. Siegel, in a Q & A DVD commentary, says his film was largely inspired by great "New York films" such as Saturday Night Fever and The Pope of Greenwich Village, and there's certainly a bit of Scorsese's Taxi Driver and King of Comedy as well, albeit with none of the visual flair. Oswalt, in the same Q & A, speaks of drawing on his real-life obsessions with comics to channel Paul's obsessive love of the Giants, but he isn't just playing a version of himself here: it's a real performance. This isn't a masterpiece, by any means, but these two men have combined to produce a small dark gem, and one of the most unusual "sports" films you'll see.