Tony Scott by Larry Taylor

Author:Larry Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

Tony Scott and his crew (unnamed) prep for a scene on The Fan (TriStar Pictures, 1996).

Yes, there are issues with The Fan, that is certain. There are editing flubs and inconsistencies, a somewhat shameless inclusion of the Nine Inch Nails song “Closer” to tie itself as closely as possible to David Fincher’s 1995 serial-killer blockbuster Se7en, and the finale loses control of the story, devolving into an insanely overwrought showdown in Candlestick Park in the middle of distractingly torrential rain that is obviously coming from a machine. But at the heart of The Fan, Tony Scott and Phoef Sutton are subverting classical notions of hero worship, and in the process, indicting celebrity. It is a subversion told with characters in the most extreme circumstances, on intensely opposing ends of the social spectrum; it’s exactly why Scott proves to be a perfect match for the material, despite the fact he knew very little about baseball.

The Fan is not a baseball movie, per se, but a thriller matching a damaged, working-class stiff suffering from fits of violent psychosis and self-aggrandizing delusions up against an aloof, disenfranchised baseball superstar with all the money in the world and barely enough heart and soul to put on a good face visiting sick children in the hospital. Scott does not immediately condemn Gil to the role of evil psychopath for the audience to root against; he allows Gil to earn sympathy, however fleeting, in the early scenes as he tries to juggle his dying career and his earnest son in terribly inept and dangerous ways. Gil is clearly unstable, but not so openly psychotic in the first half. Scott paints Gil as a poor sap and a man seething with anger as the nostalgia of his little league years fades under the weight of responsibilities for which he was never mentally prepared.

As for Bobby Rayburn, he is not simply a victim of Gil’s violent breakdown. Before sympathy falls entirely into his corner throughout the second half of the picture, Rayburn’s personality is painted in great detail. The story bounces from Gil’s thread to Bobby’s, where we see him and his agent, Manny, exhibiting cold, selfish behavior. Rayburn has little time for charity, he has no friends on the team from the beginning, and he exhibits minimal empathy for the people in his life outside of his son.

Once Gil comes fully unhinged, he loses all sympathetic beats and becomes nothing more than a knife-wielding madman to punch up the third act. Bobby Rayburn is now our hero, though we have been loaded with enough character pathos from both sides of the story to come to this finale with mixed emotions. There is no sympathy for Gil, but there is always pity. There is no wish for Bobby’s son to die, but there is also a miasma of the athlete’s unpleasant personality lingering over the final confrontation.

There is a simpler version of The Fan here, a version that most audiences took away from the film in 1996: villainous crazy person terrorizes heroic baseball player.

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