BIG FAN

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Patton Oswalt nicely plays a case study in arrested development, as live-at-home sports fan Paul Aufiero.

Paul's love for the New York Giants football team gives the only meaning to his otherwise bland existence as a parking-lot booth attendant.

Oswalt brings an everyman quality to a sensitive character whose personal sense of dignity and honesty is as charming as it is juvenile.

Paul discovers freedom of expression by writing out carefully-plotted rants about the Giants and their Philadelphia rivals that he delivers nightly via telephone on a local sports-talk radio show.

While at a pizzeria, Paul and his loyal best friend Sal (Kevin Corrigan) notice Paul's hero, Giants linebacker Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm), and make a crucial mistake.

They follow him by car around Staten Island before going into Manhattan, where they pursue Bishop into a strip club with a vague idea about meeting their object of athletic perfection.

The encounter doesn't go so well.

Bishop retaliates against Paul's self-admitted surveillance by beating him into a near coma.

Writer/director Robert Siegel (screenwriter of "The Wrestler") makes a gloomy but respectable debut with this dark drama that revels in a particular New York character type living within clearly-drawn societal lines.

The action that Siegel's quirky protagonist eventually chooses to carry out, and the way he chooses to do it, embodies a harmless but surprising form of theatricality that is satisfying in the way that it reconciles with Paul's personality.

"Big Fan" is a small movie that doesn't try to do too much, and what it does, it does well.

Rated R. 85 mins.