Napoleon Dynamite

Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), the eponymous hero of an incredibly deadpan new high-school comedy, is a gawky collection of nerdish obsessions. He worships the paraphernalia of schlock fantasy (Pegasus, iron-thewed warriors, ninja weapons) and mopes around the school hallways, his expression frozen in open-mouthed passive-aggressive hostility. Napoleon, who seems almost out of it at times, owes a lot to Max Fischer in Wes Anderson’s great Rushmore, and director Jared Hess (who wrote the script with his wife Jerusha) may have used Anderson’s style — symmetrical compositions giving a buzz of the surreal to the banal — as a jumping-off point. But Napoleon Dynamite has its own pleasures. I can’t figure out quite when the movie is set — early ‘80s? early ‘90s? — and I don’t think Hess wants you to figure it out. The film is set Whenever, in small-town Idaho, where things probably haven’t changed much in the last twenty years. The high-school girls have the crimped hairstyles of the mid-’80s, but the adults seem stuck in the ‘70s — although Napoleon’s pathetic Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) yearns to go back to 1982, to the point of buying a time machine online.

Lackadaisically plotted, Napoleon Dynamite works as a sort of shrugging character piece, even if the characters all seem rather stunted. The movie feels as if it were made by Napoleon, casting himself as the geeky-cool hero who’s always honest and who moves heaven and earth to get his friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) elected class president. Everyone else is viewed as vaguely ridiculous, though most everyone is also treated kindly in the end. Yet everything is held at arm’s length. I suspect that’s why the movie became a cult favorite among high- schoolers: Since it neither depicts nor elicits much in the way of emotion, it doesn’t risk fake emotion, and so the film can remain safely — and amusingly — stuck in neutral. I much prefer the ambition and flailing of Max in Rushmore, not to mention the saggy despair of Herman Blume, but Napoleon Dynamite, with its dead-zone dork protagonist and its air of curdled, half-jokey nostalgia, may speak to kids in a clearer way than many Hollywood teen comedies can. This thirty-four-year-old enjoyed it quite a bit. Some of the calculatedly dimbulb sequences don’t pan out, but some of them do, and the successful jokes owe more to the blank-faced Jim Jarmusch than to Wes Anderson. Those looking for credible developments should steer clear: the movie is all about the moment, the juxtaposition of the sublime and the absurd. When Napoleon’s brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who’s even more hapless than Napoleon is, finally meets his online “soulmate,” she turns out to be a warm and sexy woman who eagerly makes him over. (She’s also black, which the movie, to its credit, cares nothing about whatsoever.) Napoleon himself may find love, or at least friendship, with an equally geeky girl (Tina Majorino) who works for Glamour Shots and wears her hair in a variety of adorably strange ponytail styles. Well, she agrees to play tetherball with him, anyway. In this movie, that’s grand passion.

Explore posts in the same categories: comedy, cult