John Travolta gives his best Nicolas Cage performance since Face/Off, for better and maybe for worse, in Fred Durst’s The Fanatic. The new film stars Travolta as Moose, a mild-mannered, put-upon and mentally unstable autograph collector whose dream of getting his memorabilia signed by action/horror star Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa) goes horribly, horribly, horribly wrong.
It’s a conventional set-up, the sort of behind-the-scenes Hollywood thriller that filmmakers sometimes can’t resist, if only as an excuse to make dorky in-jokes. In one scene an autograph hound proudly announces she got a picture of cinematographer Conrad W. Hall (who shot The Fanatic), as if cinematographers were typical National Enquirer material. Also, Durst, who is the frontman for the nu-metal band Limp Bizkit, lets Dunbar and his son take an entire scene to do nothing but listen to Limp Bizkit and talk about how awesome it is.
Unfortunately, The Fanatic can’t seem to decide if it’s cheesy or dead serious, leaving the film muddled and hard to connect with. Half the time it’s hard to decide whether to laugh, cry or simply wait, impatiently, for Durst’s film to pick a tone. The only guiding light we have is Travolta, who seems eager to commit to a bonkers performance – at least 30% of which seems destined to end up as .gifs – and to his credit he never makes fun of his character. Like Moose, he isn’t afraid to look foolish in public, even when maybe he should be.
It’s easy to admire Travolta for giving his all in a film that demands he pick his ear and smell it (a lot), or choke a guy while screaming that he wishes Freddy Krueger would chop off his head. Hell, it’s easy to admire him for letting somebody, anybody, give him that awful haircut, in a movie or out of it. Travolta may not be carefully modulated but he is, at least, giving us something to see.
The Fanatic may be noteworthy for Travolta’s unhinged performance but beyond that Fred Durst’s film struggles to come together. There’s a scene where two hooligans with a pickpocketing scheme break up their partnership, and then one of them tries to enlist Moose’s help. Then the next time we see those thieves they’re back together again, bullying Moose, as if nothing ever happened. And then the next-next time we follow up on them they’re back to being broken up, and the ringleader is getting impatient for Moose’s answer, as if that middle scene never happened. It really does look like at least one part of the film is playing out of order.
Durst’s movie navigates a fine line between creepy and horrifying, never quite exploding into hellish violence but always feeling intrusive and gross. And yet, the plot just doesn’t come together. The Fanatic feels like it’s got a climax but it’s missing a denouement, leaving us with dissatisfying questions. Not about the nature of obsession or celebrity, i.e. the kind of questions we’ve been struggling to answer for generations, but about really obvious unresolved plot points that should, theoretically, be of importance to these characters. It doesn’t seem daringly ambiguous, as though we’re supposed to fill in those elements in our own mind. It just feels sloppy and rushed.
As haphazardly constructed as The Fanatic is, and as much as it relies on Travolta’s uncaged eccentricity to maintain our interest (read: too much), Durst does display an impressive sensitivity towards his protagonist. The film seems eager not to forgive Moose, or even take an easy out like condemning the society that made him, but it also doesn’t accuse him. Whatever Moose does over the course of the film, however scary it may be, and however much he may belong in a facility where he can do less harm to himself and others, Durst’s film feels sorry for him. His life is lonely, his goals are modest, and his sense of betrayal is undeniable. And if you met him in person, and he wasn’t breaking in your house and going through your belongings, you’d probably sympathize with him too.
