Fever Pitch

London, the late 80s. Paul Ashworth, an English teacher in his mid-30s at a North London comprehensive, is an obsessive fan of Arsenal football club. He has supported the team since early childhood, when his father used to take him to matches. A new teacher, Sarah Hughes, arrives at the school. A strict disciplinarian, she can't stand Paul's freewheeling approach to the job or his boorish behaviour in the staff common room. Despite their differences, they start seeing one another. She comes to realise just how obsessed he is with Arsenal, accompanies him to a game and develops a mild interest in the team herself.  But after Sarah becomes pregnant, the relationship comes unstuck. She is exasperated by Paul's childish attitude to fatherhood and they drift apart. Paul endures a rocky interview with the school governors when he applies to be head of year. The school football team, which he coaches, is narrowly defeated in the final of an inter-school competition. Even worse, it looks as if Arsenal have blown their chances of winning the League Championship. Having frittered away a substantial points lead, they need to defeat Liverpool by two goals away from home on the last day of the season -  something which Paul doubts is possible. 

Paul and his friend Steve watch the crucial match on television. Sarah, meanwhile, is at an end-of-term party. She leaves early and takes a cab to Paul's flat. He is too preoccupied with the football to answer the doorbell. Instead, not knowing who is there, he roars insults out of the window. She leaves. Into injury time, Arsenal score the goal which wins them the championship. Paul joins in the impromptu street party outside Arsenal's ground. He meets Sarah there, who is also celebrating the victory and now seems a die-hard Arsenal fan herself. Buoyed up by Arsenal's triumph, the two are reconciled. 

In his autobiography, Self-Consciousness, John Updike recalls going to a cinema to see a film called The Witches of Eastwick; watching it with a strange fascination and wondering what relation, if any, it bore to his novel of the same name. Fans of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch are liable to feel a similar bewilderment when confronted with the film version. Somehow Hornby's elliptical, witty confessional has turned into a screwball romantic comedy set in North London. 

Where the book used diary-style first-person narration and spanned more than 20 years of obsessive soccer fandom, the film is set almost exclusively during Arsenal's 1988-89 championship-winning season. The fluctuating fortunes of the hero Paul Ashworth's favourite football team are matched by the ups and downs in his relationship with fellow teacher, Ms Hughes (Ruth Gemmell). 

Given that Hornby wrote the screenplay himself, the film can hardly be called a betrayal. It retains many of the original jokes and anecdotes, but attempts to graft them onto a conventional, linear narrative. Through evocative snapshots of lost afternoons at Highbury or Wembley, Hornby's book was able to rekindle memories of specific moments in his adolescence. In the film, this resonance is lost. As Hornby observes, there are never really any climactic points in an English football fan's life. With brief interruptions between May and August, the game rolls on from season to season. The same team which loses a Cup Final in May will be back in the competition the following January. Even what he refers to as The Greatest Moment Ever - the goal that Michael Thomas scored in injury time against Liverpool in the last match of the season to win Arsenal their first championship in 18 years - warrants only a chapter in the book, and it is immediately followed by an account of a game with Coventry the following season. 

In the film, however, the Thomas goal is crucial. It is the moment towards which the entire narrative has been building, when the hero and his girlfriend are miraculously reunited, and VE Day-style street parties break out all over North London. (Not since the rioters took to the streets at the end of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid have there been less convincing crowd scenes in a British film.) This absurd finale is adolescent male wish-fulfilment fantasy at its most ludicrous. Thanks to Arsenal's moment of triumph, Paul (Colin Firth) is conveniently absolved of his responsibilities as a prospective father and would-be head of year (a job which, unsurprisingly, he fails to get). The film's earlier, fitful attempts at taking Sarah's point of view are shown to be little more than a distraction. 

Visually Fever Pitch is stuck somewhere between Grange Hill and Gregory's Girl. Its low-key, unfussy naturalism is reminiscent of much recent television drama. (First-time feature director David Evans, whose television credits range from Common as Muck to Band of Gold, clearly has a small-screen sensibility.) There is something fetishistic about its attention to detail - there is an attempt in flashback to recreate its hero's childhood through sideburns, suede jackets. and old children's television shows such as The Clangers. The movie Fever Pitch is full of in-jokes and nostalgic allusions that may baffle anybody not steeped in the minutiae of 70s British popular culture. The blokeish tone soon begins to grate as do the occasional sociological asides - for instance the bathetic moment in which Paul watches footage of the Hillsborough disaster and pompously proclaims that football must "go on". 

Unsurprisingly, the pleasures of Fever Pitch lie more in the incidental details than the overall structure. Colin Firth plays Paul with shambolic understatement. If he looks distracted, you know it is because he is thinking about his favourite football team. Whether attempting to teach his schoolboys to play an Arsenal-style offside trap or watching his friend Steve (Mark Strong) clowning behind a goal as somebody prepares to take a penalty, he offers an enjoyably deadpan caricature of the typical Arsenal fan - "dour, defensive, argumentative, repressed," as Hornby himself classifies the type. 

The flashback scenes, in which Paul appears as an Adrian Mole-like youngster who can only establish a rapport with his divorced father (Neil Pearson) by watching football with him, are touching. There are also colourful cameos from Ken Stott as an irascible head teacher and from Stephen Rea as a football-fixated school governor. However, for all the film-makers' attempts to develop a little narrative momentum, Fever Pitch remains stubbornly intractable. As action switches from Paul and Steve's two 'men behaving badly', to Sarah and her flatmate Jo (Holly Aird), it begins to seem as inert and predictable as an extended sitcom pilot episode. Its self-deprecating irony and use of football as metaphor - the way it explores Paul's relationship with his father and his girlfriend through his obsession with Arsenal - mark it down as very different from more conventional boy's own football tales such as Yesterday's Hero or When Saturday Comes. But in its way, it is every bit as contrived. Drifting along nowhere in particular, it relies on a last-minute goal to knit matters together. The implication is clear: Paul will be a model father and teacher just as long as Arsenal keep on winning.