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THE FAN
Rating: 
USA. 1996.
Director – Tony Scott, Screenplay – Phoef Sutton, Based on the Novel by Peter Abrahams, Producer – Wendy Finerman, Photography – Dariusz Wolski, Music – Hans Zimmer, Music Supervisor – Sharon Boyle, Special Effects Supervisor – Joe Ramsey, Makeup Effects – Kevin Yagher, Production Design – Ida Random. Production Company – Mandalay Entertainment/TriStar Pictures.
Cast:
Robert De Niro (Gil Renard), Wesley Snipes (Bobby Rayburn), Ellen Barkin (Jewel), John Leguizamo (Manny), Benicio Del Toro (Juan Primo), Brandon Hammond (Sean Rayburn), Andrew J. Ferchland (Ritchie Renard), Dan Butler (Garrity), Charles Hallahan (Coop), Patti D’Arbanville-Quinn (Ellen Renard)
Plot: Gil Renard works as a knife salesman in the firm started by his father. He is coming under much pressure from his boss to increase his sales. Gil is also a rabid fan of the Giants baseball team. Torn between work pressure and taking his son to a Giants game, he leaves his son at the stadium, only for his estranged wife to then serve him with a restraining order for child neglect. Next Gil is fired from his job for failing to keep up his sales. He then begins to become obsessed, believing he has an affinity with the Giants new player Bobby Rayburn. He murders fellow player Juan Primo who insists on taking No 11, something that Bobby believes is his lucky number and is responsible for him having a bad playing streak. But when Bobby refuses to acknowledge Primo’s death as the cause of his recovered luck, Gil resorts to abducting Bobby’s son.
Robert De Niro has built a minor reputation playing memorable psychos – Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1983) and Max Cady in Cape Fear (1991) – all interestingly enough for Martin Scorsese. All of these parts, excepting that of Cady, cast De Niro as an ordinary man struggling against his insignificance and trying to assert himself against the rest of the world. The Fan casts De Niro in a similar role.
The Fan in many ways resembles the vile Falling Down (1993) – it is the chronicle of an ordinary man driven to psychosis by the everyday stresses of modern life. Although unlike Falling Down, which had Michael Douglas on a redneck rampage through L.A., The Fan does not support its character’s actions. The extended first half of the film gives a plausible series of crosscuts and glimpses into the tensions that harry De Niro – the pressure to boost his sales, the disinterested clients, his attempts to maintain a relationship with his son while juggling work commitments culminating in his leaving his son at the stadium while he goes off to an appointment, his wife’s subsequent serving him with a restraining order, his firing. The pressure builds obliquely – director Tony Scott keeps De Niro framed inside duskily lit rooms, surrounded by dense clutter as though he is being visually surrounded and rendered insignificant by the weight of modern life. And when things start to explode, the effects are quite startling – there is one shot that quite jolts people in their seats where De Niro throws one of his knives across the room at a cockroach, impaling it and the knife is seen piercing right through the other side of the door.
Tony Scott is the brother of Ridley Scott of Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) fame. In the mid-1980s, Tony Scott emerged as an efficient commercial director with films ranging from the bad – Beverly Hills Cop II (1986), Days of Thunder (1990) – to the underrated – The Last Boy Scout (1991). Tony Scott has always seemed happy being an efficient commercial craftsman and no more than that and it wasn’t until True Romance (1993) and particularly Crimson Tide (1995) that he really made people notice his name. His screen debut was the fascinating vampire film The Hunger (1983). The Hunger is shot in an extraordinarily dense and arty style. But after The Hunger’s mixed reception, Scott subsequently abandoned such visual experimentation. The Fan however gave him the chance to return to that style and he relishes the opportunity. Tony Scott’s subsequently films, like Man on Fire (2004), the completely lunatic Domino (2005) and the time travel film Deja Vu (2006), show him harnessing a really arty style to commercially mainstream films.
The film here is visually alive. It is extraordinarily beautifully photographed. In every frame Scott seems to capture a vital, almost hyper-realized energy. The film pulses with the play of light, with slow-motion cutaways to pitchers moving with the ball, spitting onto the pitch. The soundtrack is one of the most remarkable pieces of sound engineering in years – the hard pulse of a dance track cuts in and out over the action and dialogue, and comes with a jagged and raw feel of unfashioned chaos. In many other hands the plot could have served to make only a routine thriller. But during the second half, Scott really starts to wind the suspense up. There’s a disturbing scene where Robert De Niro stabs Benicio Del Toro with a knife, while Scott plays the confrontation between De Niro and Wesley Snipes at the beach with a real edgy psychosis.
Amongst the cast, Robert De Niro naturally dominates the action and plays quite reasonably, although this is ultimately a role that is not quite up there with one of his great performances. Wesley Snipes is an actor who most of the time comes across as just seeming blank or even slow. Snipes is not really up to much here and Tony Scott uses him more for his physical look – shooting the gleam of his shaven head and black muscular body. Ellen Barkin seems there simply so the film can have a female lead. Her role as the radio sportscaster seems superfluous and is not really connected to the main action – it gives all the appearance of a part that has been beefed up so a star can play it.
The Fan should not be confused with the otherwise unrelated film of the same name, The Fan (1981), which featured a Michael Biehn as a psychopathic celebrity stalker.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1996
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