A Gap in Their Lives

Rating: 8/10 (1 January 2014)

Once during my schooldays our religious education teacher set us an essay on whether we thought that the modern obsession with sport and pop music was due to a "gap in people's lives" caused by the decline of organised religion. (One of my classmates started his essay with "If they're Chelsea fans the only gap in their lives is the one between their ears"- a sentiment calculated to rile the teacher, who was of course a fan of that club). Tony Scott's film does not have much to say about the decline of organised religion, but it does explore the phenomenon of the obsessive sports fan and the possibility that such people may be trying to compensate for other "gaps in their lives".
The main character Gil Renard has a lot in common with William Foster, the anti-hero of another mid-nineties film, Joel Schumacher's "Falling Down". Like Foster, he is a divorcée who has become bitterly estranged from his ex-wife who is trying to keep him from seeing their one child. (Here a boy, in "Falling Down" a girl). Both are unemployed, having been sacked from companies for which they have worked for many years, and both have become disillusioned with modern society as a whole. Foster worked for a defence contractor but was made redundant when the end of the Cold War meant a reduction in American defence spending. Gil is a knife salesman who has been fired because of poor sales figures, but who blames his sacking on the company's cynical policy of deliberately selling low-priced, low-quality products. Gil has some justification for this attitude; the firm was founded by his father, a skilled craftsman and a perfectionist, but its new management takes the view that perfection and principles have no place in business.
Having lost both his job and his family, Gil's one remaining passion is for baseball. He is an obsessive fan of the San Francisco Giants and of the team's star player, Bobby Rayburn. (Gil himself was a talented player in his youth, but never played the game professionally). When Rayburn suffers from a run of poor form, causing the team's fans to boo him, and when rumours start about a developing rift between Rayburn and another Giants' star, Juan Primo, Gil decides it is time to take drastic action.
This is not the first time Robert De Niro has played an obsessive fan. In "King of Comedy" his character, Rupert Pupkin, was an aspiring stand- up comedian obsessed with an established comedian. The two films, however, are very different in tone. "King of Comedy" is a satirical black comedy; Pupkin may carry out a kidnapping, but his crime is treated in a tongue-in-cheek manner and he remains an amusing, almost endearing, character. (And he manages to have the last laugh even after being sent to jail). "The Fan", by contrast, is a serious psychological thriller and Gil's actions are always treated seriously. There are also certain similarities with another De Niro character, again an obsessive loner with a grudge against society, Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver".
In form, "The Fan" is a "deranged stalker" thriller, following the structure of something like "Fatal Attraction" or "Single White Female", with Gil as its villain. Yet perhaps it would be more accurate to see him as an anti-hero rather than a straightforward villain. Although he kills two people, and threatens the lives of others, in some ways he is himself a victim, a victim of a court system which treats divorced fathers unfairly and of a business culture which puts a greater premium on profit than on craftsmanship and which treats employees and customers alike with contempt. Even when it comes to his favourite sport, Gil may have some cause for complaint. When he meets Rayburn he becomes disillusioned with his idol's contempt for the fans who pay his wages. Rayburn's insistence that he plays for himself, not for his team's supporters, might seem an admirable attitude in an amateur sportsman; in the case of a professional earning $40 million per annum it just seems like self-indulgence. (Incidentally, was that salary figure a goof or a deliberate exaggeration? Even today no baseball player earns that much; in 1996 the highest paid stars were earning around $10 million).
De Niro made a stellar start to his cinematic career in the seventies and eighties, but since then has not always fulfilled his promise. Perhaps "Godfather II" and "Taxi Driver" were just too hard an act to follow, or perhaps he has tried to make too many films, not all of which have been of the highest quality. Some of his later films, however, have been excellent ones, and "The Fan" is a good example. He gives a spellbinding performance as the manically obsessive Gil, the sort of sports fan who reminds you that the word "fan" was originally short for "fanatic" and for whom baseball has become more important than life itself. He receives excellent support from Wesley Snipes as Rayburn.
The late Tony Scott never seemed to be as highly regarded by the critics as his brother Ridley, one of the cinema's leading auteurs. Yet in my view Tony's talents were of a rather different sort to his brother's. When he tried to make an auteur-style film with "The Hunger", the result was a pretentious mess. His talent lay in making more conventional action thrillers, but in making good ones, often with a certain amount of social comment or political significance involved. "Crimson Tide" and "Enemy of the State" were two good examples, and "The Fan" is another. It is perhaps the best cinematic exploration of the social aspects of spectator sport and the darker side of sporting fandom. Perhaps my classmate was more right than he knew when he said that some sports fans have a gap between their ears. 8/10