A friend of mine, and fellow St. Louisan, wondered a couple of weeks ago how Fever Pitch would be received in the Gateway City. Would Cardinals fans go see a movie that they might perceive as twisting the knife deeper into wounds still fresh from last October? Well I am here to tell you that Redbird Nation has nothing to worry about.

Let's remove the Red Sox from the picture for a moment. If someone told you that this movie was directed by the Farrelly Brothers and written by two writers who know a lot about baseball (Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel of City Slickers and A League of Their Own fame), you'd jump in the car and head to the closest multiplex faster than David Wells can scarf down a porterhouse. But this is not really a baseball movie, nor is it even the best movie about the Red Sox (that honor goes to Fear Strikes Out).

But, Fever Pitch, based on Nick Hornby's (High Fidelity, About A Boy) novel of the same name, is less the obsessive first-person tale that Hornby spins about a guy fixated on his favorite team, and more a sweet as Cracker Jack romantic comedy.

Jimmy Fallon plays Ben, whose love for the Red Sox begins when his Uncle Carl takes then young Ben to Fenway to see the Sox lose. Don't get too excited, his uncle tells him on the car ride home, “They're only going to break your heart.” Ben doesn't listen and when his uncle dies and leaves him his prime season tickets, he has already embarked on the path to being a fanatic.

For all intents and purposes, Ben is a normal guy. During the offseason, “Winter Ben” is a well-loved school teacher who any twenty-something woman would be a fool not to go out with. He's kind and considerate – the perfect boyfriend. But when Spring Training rolls around, “Summer Ben” awakens and his obsession with the Sox puts the kibosh on any chances for a relationship. Summer Ben is a nutjob – he lives in a mini-shrine to the Sox, he leaps into the arms of the UPS driver who delivers his season tickets, he gets down on one knee to invite Lindsay (Drew Barrymore) to Opening Day - but he doesn't approach the fanaticism of those who read and write this blog, and he isn't nearly the nutjob Robert De Niro is in The Fan. Still, the driven and successful Lindsay puts up with Ben's eccentricities, hoping, as all women do, that she can change her man to love her more than baseball (which is better than life, because it's fair).

Ben and Lindsay's relationship has its ups and downs and I can only guess how this movie was meant to end; Ben sells his season tickets and he and Lindsay live happily ever after, but last fall's strange turn of events forced a rewrite so Ben can have his cake and eat it too.

Fever Pitch is a great date movie, but it's a much tamer version of the films we've come to expect from the directors of Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, and There's Something About Mary. Gone are the typical gross-out scenes (save for Drew Barrymore puking off-screen and her dog licking it up or Barrymore getting plunked on the noggin with a foul ball), gone are featured parts for handicapped people appearing as normal gifted people (save for cancer patient, Jordan Leandre, singing the national anthem before a game), and gone are the Farrellys' proclivity for casting sports figures in substantial roles (see Brett Favre in Something About Mary, Roger Clemens in Kingpin, and Cam Neely in Stuck On You, Me, Myself & Irene, and Dumb and Dumber). Johnny Damon, Jason Varitek, and Trot Nixon all make an appearance, bloated versions of Dennis Eckersley, Jim Rice, and Keith Macwhorter (who played a grand total off 14 games with the Sox, giving up 5 runs in his 1.1 inning debut) show up in a flashback, but there was a prime opportunity here to have seen Bill Buckner dropping a bag of peanuts in the stands or Carl Yastrzemski giving dating advice to Jimmy Fallon.

Also missing from Fever Pitch is any semblance of real baseball fans. Where are the thick, nearly unintelligible Boston accents? Sure, Ben has his fellow Sox-infatuated movie buddies (none of whom, including Ben, appear to be from Boston) but aside from a scene when the season ticket holders who sit in Ben's section discuss the Curse of the Bambino, we never get to feel the pain of 86 years of never quite winning the big one. Nor do we get to experience the joy that real Sox fans must have felt when they finally got their World Series victory (Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore making out near second base in Busch doesn't count). As fans of a team that has won 9 World Series but has failed to win one in 22 years, we are only left with knowing what it's like to get there and not quite get the job done. And for that, there's always next year.

Rating: **1/2