“Big Fan” – For love of the game

Dir. Robert D. Siegel
(2009, R, 86 min)
★ ★ ★ ★

I saw Invictus one week ago; it’s a big-scale sports movie with small ideas, taking its Big Issues and reducing them to simplistic cliches about courage, adversity, and other words in Hallmark cards. Now I’ve seen its polar opposite. From Robert D. Siegel, making a fantastic directing debut, Big Fan is a small-scale drama that runs infinitely deeper. It’s a great, sad film about an inauspicious man devoted to football for lack of anything else.