Rating: 1/2 star out of 4
A hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the soulless Napoleon Dynamite earned Jared Hess inexplicable comparisons to Wes Anderson by virtue of the detail-oriented film being produced on a shoestring budget, except its utter contempt of character puts it on par with the worst anti-humanist comedies of all time (Dumb and Dumberer comes immediately to mind). In a remote town in Idaho (circa the present, except everyone wants to return to 1982 for reasons unknown), a dim-witted, aesthetically challenged loser named Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) spends much of his time feeding his pet llama, throwing pieces of meat at his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), fighting with his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), and condescending to the world at large, namely his Mexican best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez). An elaborate non sequitur, Napoleon Dynamite traffics in one depth-less character after another and watches as they blindly engage in a spectacle of shallow bumblef---ery. Hess contents himself by throwing one random joke after another at the screen (a bully smashes the tater tots Napoleon keeps in his side pocket, the boys at the local chicken farm are served egg juice by their farmer bosses, Pedro's thugged-out cousins intimidate the honkys with their juiced-up vehicle, and so on). Naturally, all the audience can do is watch which ones manage to stick. (For me, just one: Napoleon's idea of a pick-up line is, "I caught you a delicious bass.") Hess's idea of nuance is afflicting the ostensibly straight Kip with an offensive lisp or subjecting the comatose Pedro to repeated racial barbs. In one of the film's more insulting sequences, the high school principal questions the boy's ability to speak English while Napoleon confuses him for a cafeteria worker or a janitor (really they1re all the same, right?). Napoleon learns to dance using a tape of D-Qwon's Dance Moves (because black people can groove, get it?), the Internet-obsessed Kip falls in love with a black girl named LaFawnduh who drives in from Detroit (because that's where they all live), and a white girl who runs against Pedro for high school president clinches her opening speech with the following: "Who wants to eat chimichangas next year?" Because there's nothing funnier than country bumpkins acting like idiots for 90 minutes straight, the one-joke Napoleon Dynamite happily offers itself to cynical audiences, some of whom have read the film's breakdancing sequence as an act of compassion (as if Napoleon is in it for anyone but himself). To his credit, Hess seems to recognize how rotten to the core his film is, and as such his characters spend much of the time staring comatose at the fourth wall before flies begin to slowly gather around their faces.
Rating: **** [4 stars out of 4]
To hear Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), the titular hero of Jared Hess' idiosyncratic and warmhearted teen comedy, tell it, he enjoyed a very exciting summer "hunting wolverines in Alaska" with his uncles. In his own hyperbolic mind, at least, he may even believe that tall tale and the ones about being a genius computer hacker, a talented artist, a martial-arts nun chucks specialist, and a real ladies' man. Not that it's likely that it would matter even if a tenth of what he claims were true. In his hometown of Preston, Idaho, he's still the boy who gets shoved into his locker by the other kids at school and gets no respect at the home he shares with his grandmother (Sandy Martin), chat-room-obsessed older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), and pet llama Tina. No wonder his speech is a symphony of sarcasm and barely contained fury.
And after Grandma injures her coccyx while out off-roading, Napoleon's life gets that much worse when his sleazy Uncle Rico (the brilliant Jon Gries) moves in. He's supposed to take care of the boys, but instead lures Kip into a door-to-door sales scheme, while his mere presence tortures Napoleon. It is only when Napoleon befriends new kid in town Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and begins to see classmate Deb (Tina Majorino) in a new and desirable light that Napoleon's life begins looking up--and even then, the question remains: Will he ever find anyone to play tetherball with him?
In certain superficial ways, Napoleon Dynamite resembles Todd Solondz' Welcome to the Dollhouse, at least in the many ways it finds to humiliate Napoleon. But Hess and his co-writer and wife Jerusha's vision is warmer than Solondz'. Napoleon's life may be seemingly filled with trials, but he has a knack for enduring and transcending the worst of them. And while the popular kids might see him as one of life's losers, time and again he contradicts that assessment as he battles back from each setback with indomitable can-do attitude.
In a way, Napoleon Dynamite is as much modern folk tale as it is coming-of-age comedy. Though set in the present, there is a certain sense of Preston as a place out of time--and not just because of Rico's ancient Dodge van, '70s-era hairpiece, and nostalgia for the 1982 football season where he could have been the big game's hero if only the coach had let him leave the bench. The whole town seems stuck in 1975 with only Kip's adventures online and Napoleon's references to hacking to suggest more modern times.
With characters as outsized as Napoleon and Rico and sometimes absurd situations, the film runs the risk of devolving into a live-action cartoon. That it never does is a credit to the Hess' strong screenplay and to the actors--in the most ridiculous of circumstances, script and players still manage to locate an essential humanity. Napoleon with his big hair, bad clothes, and bluster may not be the typical movie hero--and in teen movie terms, no one is going to mistake this kid for Ferris Bueller--but for anyone who remembers the tribulation that was high school, he'll do.
Grade: B+
Going to high school is hard enough, but being an utter outcast can take a toll on a guy.
Such is the case with Preston, Idaho, high school student Napoleon Dynamite.
OK, the name is absurd (it's also Elvis Costello's alter ego), but "Napoleon Dynamite" is a fine indie comedy from twenty-something director Jared Hess.
Hess -- like chic geek filmmakers Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and Alexander Payne before him -- knows his characters - sad sacks and misunderstood nerd geniuses who inhabit straight-laced Middle America and make the best of a bad situation.
Napoleon (Jon Heder) leans more toward the sad sack side of the scales. Not that he isn1t smart. In fact, this squinty-eyed mouth-breather can distinguish three different kinds of milk at an FFA event. That's one skill most of us probably don1t have.
But that doesn1t make up for the fact that Napoleon is gangly and awkward, sports oversized prescription specs and wears thrift-store T-shirts tucked into his pants. He also has a thing for wearing snow boots in warm, dry weather. This poor misfit is a living, walking eyesore.
Napoleon lives with his unemployed older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), a mousy pervert (think cartoonist R. Crumb) who spends his days meeting ladies on the Internet.
The head of the household is their four-wheelin1 grandma who is hospitalized early in the film after getting into an accident while riding on the sand dunes outside town.
As the fast-livin1 granny recovers, creepy, scheming door-to-door salesman Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) moves in to watch the brothers. Uncle Rico dresses like it was the height of the disco era and drives a burnt orange Dodge van to match. It's as if Jimmy Carter were still president, even though the movie takes place in present day.
Napoleon, meanwhile, is getting beat up in high school and struggles to even play solo games of tetherball. But then he befriends a new student, a young Mexican migrant from Juarez named Pedro Sanchez (Efren Ramirez).
Napoleon thinks Pedro is suave with his mustache and bold moves with the babes. Eventually, Napoleon helps Pedro run for class president against popular blonde cheerleader Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff).
If you1re thinking there's one storyline here, you1d be mistaken. While the movie is about Napoleon it is also about the eccentric characters that inhabit small-town Idaho, a place that hasn1t quite caught up with 21st century America.
We do get to see Napoleon meet a sweet female classmate named Deb (Tina Majorino) and watch Pedro ask her to the high school dance, leaving the afro-ed Napoleon a bit perplexed.
There are some truly amusing scenes, such as when Uncle Rico buys a "time machine" off the Internet, in hopes of going back to 1982 and reliving his high school football days.
And it is a scream when Napoleon tells a friend about his "liger" doodles. A liger, for the uninitiated out there, is a cross between a lion and a tiger. Too funny! In fact there are so many funny scenes there isn1t enough space to mention them all.
One thing I should mention about Napoleon, as compared, to say, overachiever Max Fischer in Wes Anderson's "Rushmore," is that Napoleon is a bit more annoying. He's not terribly lovable but you do feel for him at times.
Hess, who learned his trade at Utah's Brigham Young University, is part of a growing group of creative Mormon directors like Richard Dutcher ("God's Army," "Brigham City") and Kurt Hale ("The R.M." and "The Singles Ward").
I think Hess did a great job with "Napoleon Dynamite," even though the ending is a bit too tidy. Still, I hear an alternate ending is already making the rounds. I guess we1ll have to wait for the DVD to see it.
Rating: **** [4 stars out of 5]
I admit to being pretty disenchanted with the indie-film scene. It's become so enmeshed in its own formula of calculated quirkiness that it rarely shows any more originality than does the most heavily test-marketed Hollywood extravaganza -- and sometimes less so. I'm equally over the indie-film snobbery that works on the belief that if a movie was made for $50,000, it's automatically more valuable than one that was made for $50 million. And because of this, I'm automatically skeptical of the Next Big Thing to emerge from the land of the no-budget film, with everyone rushing in to applaud.
In the case of Napoleon Dynamite, I was also not overly enticed by the trailer. No, that's an understatement: I thought it was absolutely dreadful (and still do). But upon seeing the film itself, I understand that the trailer couldn't have been much else -- there's simply no way to give the flavor of this peculiar, oddly charming little film in a series of clips running two-and-a-half minutes. The flat monotone of the main character doesn't lend itself to excerpts.
Yes, Napoleon Dynamite has some of that forced indie quirkiness, but it also possesses a certain wayward originality -- or at least a mix of influences that seem original. The closest approximation I can come up with to describe the film is to ask you to imagine a Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tannenbaums) screenplay directed by John Waters.
Napoleon Dynamite is an outgrowth of a short film by director/co-writer Jared Hess; Peluca, which also starred Jon Heder, had a similar story -- and a nine-minute running time. (The Internet Movie Database review of Peluca celebrates the little film's greatness, but comes from someone from Provo, Utah -- perhaps one of Hess' friends from his old alma mater, Brigham Young University? No matter.)
Hess' other previous credits are all as assistant cameraman for religious four-wallers -- mostly for the Mormon church, but also, oddly, for the Billy Graham production The Climb. And while Napolean Dynamite marks his first shot at a feature of his own, it owes nothing to his four-waller background. And, more often than not, it scores.
I have no idea what Hess' actual religious beliefs might be; the only probable vestige of his background in the film is his treating door-to-door sales as a viable way of making a living (these days, about the only thing that's sold door-to-door is religion). In the world of Napoleon Dynamite, the occupation seems perfectly believable, especially since it's plied by characters whose grasp on reality is tenuous at best.
Working from a screenplay co-authored by wife Jerusha, Hess has fabricated something both less and more than a story. There's not much of a conventional narrative here; in its place is a freakish kind of alternate world recognizable as being somehow akin to -- but hardly the same as -- the one we inhabit.
The setting is Preston, Idaho -- a place that seems to belong to no specific time, and yet to every time. There is indeed a real Preston (population 4,000), and the film was shot there. But Hess' take on the place is along the lines of David Lynch's vision of our own state's Lumberton in Blue Velvet. We get not the town, per se, but an impression of it. The near-brilliance of Hess' perception comes from his not allowing his characters to behave -- or even understand -- that they exist in a backwards backwater; they think they're modern and normal, and just the same as the rest of the world.
One of Preston's least glorious residents is über-nerd Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), the film's central character. He's strange -- gawky, awkward, yet peculiarly belligerent. Considering he lives with his ATV-riding, pet-llama-keeping grandmother (Sandy Martin) and his nebbishy chatroom-lothario brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), it's surprising that Napoleon isn't even more of a social disaster.
The plot -- such as it is -- is set in motion when Grandma breaks her coccyx in an ATV accident, allowing the brothers' no-account Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) to descend upon the household as their self-appointed guardian during her hospital stay. It's a not unreasonable move on the part of a man who appears to otherwise live out of his van.
Uncle Rico is one of the film's more perversely fascinating characters. He actually is stuck in time -- 1982 to be exact, the year in which he peaked (as a high-school football player), and after which it all went downhill for him. He spends his time videotaping himself throwing a football, being generally disagreeable and selling a variant on Tupperware door-to-door (at least until he switches to peddling an herbal breast-enhancement treatment). At the same time, he's not much more out there than is Kip, who has met the love of his life, LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), in an online chatroom, and is bringing her to Preston.
In the midst of these tangents, we find Napoleon becoming enamored of the quirky Deb (Tina Majorino) and making friends with Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a new student recently arrived from Mexico; Pedro is, if anything, even more awkward than Napoleon. It's all exaggerated, yes, but it's also all grounded in the recognizably real. Best of all, most of it is very funny, and in a way that really stays with you. And in the end, Napoleon emerges as the poster child for the nerd in all of us in this sly and charming movie.
By the way: You'll want to sit through the end credits, since they're followed by a fairly lengthy scene that didn't make the final cut of the body of the film.
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 stars out of 4]
Your appreciation of "Napoleon Dynamite" will depend on your willingness to embrace your inner geek.
"Napoleon" asks us to laugh at its title character, a super-dweeby high school student whose exploits include using a time machine and helping a friend run for political office. That stuff is explosively funny, but the movie is after more than that. Having laughed at Napoleon, we begin to feel uncomfortable about whether it's fair to laugh at somebody who makes us feel superior. And that uncomfortable feeling is just what "Napoleon Dynamite" wants. We are supposed to feel bad about snickering at Napoleon because feeling bad puts us in a place where we sympathize and realize we have more in common with Napoleon than we might think.
It occurs to me that I'm making "Napoleon Dynamite" sound like work, and it's not. That's the stuff you'll think about afterward, if you take time to think about your reactions to the film. But, as you're watching it, the main thing you'll be doing is laughing your dang head off.
You'll laugh at the pathetic way Napoleon's Uncle Rico crosses his arms over his chest to make his biceps look bigger. You'll laugh at Napoleon's narcoleptic speech patterns and sad pick-up lines ("I see you're drinking 1 percent. Is that because you think you're fat? You're not. You could be drinking whole milk, if you want to."). You'll laugh at the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I level of discourse. You'll laugh at the admirably un-smug performances by the actors, who are so believably zonked out they may not be castable in any other movies, and I mean that as a compliment.
But the achievement of the film is that, having forced us to laugh at -- not with -- its characters, it pulls a switcheroo. The supposedly cool people in "Napoleon," one of whom performs an insane dance routine to the Backstreet Boys, are even geekier than the geeks. And when Napoleon unleashes his own version of break-dancing, there's something awe-inspiring in the sincerity and commitment of his moves.
That scene makes clear how much affection "Napoleon" has for its characters. We laugh at all the nerdy behavior in the movie, and there's a reason that's OK: Because, deep down, we know we are all nerds.
Bottom line: A one-note, lightweight, condescending comedy about the rubes of Idaho.
Sundance Film Festival
PARK CITY -- Jerry Lewis, meet Wes Anderson. "Napoleon Dynamite" from director/co-writer Jared Hess tries to marry Anderson's deadpan style of portraying oddball behavior with the goofy antics of a Lewis-like outsider/anti-hero. Set in Idaho, the film views all its characters as potato-heads with limited mental faculties.
It should be reported that Sundance audiences roared with laughter at these rustic rubes and Fox Searchlight acquired the film for $3 or $4.75 million depending on whom you asked. It should also be reported that Sundance audience of the past have roared with laughter at comedies that fall flat in domestic release. Whether such history repeats itself depends on how down market Fox Searchlight takes its promotion of this comedy. This is certainly not one of its prestige offerings.
The dim-witted, gawky protagonist, named Napoleon Dynamite," is a misfit's misfit. His red hair puffs up in a curly explosion above a face that wears the same quizzical, pained expression for the entire movie, no mean feat for a young, physically adroit, tall actor named Jon Heder. Napoleon is the kid everyone picks on and no one wants to play with.
He comes from a family of nerds and dolts. Brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) spends his days surfing Internet chat rooms searching for a soul mate. Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) spends his days bemoaning the 1982 high school football season, where he missed his shot at the pros, and selling plastic kitchen wear and herbal breast implants to bored housewives. When Grandma gets banged-up flipping her dune buggy on a date, the unwanted Uncle Rico moves in to "take care" of the family.
Then Napoleon's only friend, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), newly arrived from Mexico and nearly as dorky as Napoleon, impulsively decides to run for student body president against ever-popular though stuck-up Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff). Napoleon tries to lend a hand along with the shiest girl in school, Deb (Tina Majorino).
The plot is mostly a collection of skits and bits all predicated on the daftness and klutziness of central characters that make the "Dumb and Dumber" pair look like slick operators. By hammering away at this single note, Hess does bludgeon laughs from the most reluctantly audience members. And Heder does have a knack with physical humor and eliciting audience sympathy when none should be forthcoming. But the joke is always the same, and even the most easily amused may grow weary of that sameness.
Hess' production crew drives home the point that the story takes place in the land of the lost. Munn Powell's cinematography emphasizes the flat horizontals and verticals of the Midwest landscape. Cory Lory Lorenzen's production design and Jerusha Hess' costumes -- she is also co-writer and wife to the filmmaker -- make clear that nobody here has any sense of style or taste.
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
Fox Searchlight
Credits:
Director: Jared Hess
Writers: Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess
Producers: Jeremy Coon, Sean C. Covel, Chris Wyatt
Executive producer: Jeremy Coon, Jory Weitz
Director of photography: Munn Powell
Production designer: Cory Lorenzen
Music: John Swihart
Costume designer: Jerusha Hess
Editor: Jeremy Coon
Cast: Napoleon Dynamite: Jon Heder
Uncle Rico: Jon Gries
Kip: Aaron Ruell
Pedro: Efren Ramirez
Deb: Tino Majorino
Rex: Diedrich Bader
Summer Wheatley: Halie Duff
Running time -- 86 minutes
No MPAA rating
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 5]
Fans of Wes Anderson will recognize and hope for what Idaho newcomer Jared Hess has created with the Sundance sensation Napoleon Dynamite: A good first effort that points to even better films to come.
Think Bottle Rocket, Anderson's wildly uneven but frequently hilarious debut from 1996, and you have the book on Napoleon Dynamite. It's not as hilarious as it thinks it is, and it's sometimes too weird for words, but it is often pretty funny. If Hess lives up to his obvious potential, something along the lines of Anderson's Rushmore might be next (or perhaps Alexander Payne's Election, to cite another influence).
The title character of Napoleon Dynamite, played with deadpan panache by new face Jon Heder, is a carrot-topped teen geek who says "sweet!" a lot, but whose goggle-eyed and dentally challenged mug is perpetually frozen in sullen disinterest. He lives in a backwater part of Idaho where everybody is an idiot striving to be a character.
Napoleon doesn't really know what he wants to do, but he's plenty peeved about not getting what he wants. He's also prone to spinning tale tales about imaginary successes.
"What are you doing today?" a kid asks him on the school bus.
"Anything I want!" Napoleon retorts, and to prove it he tosses a plastic action figure out of a bus window, dragging it on a string in a gesture that must seem defiant in Preston, Idaho (the Hess hometown where the film was made).
Napoleon lives with his grandmother (Sandy Martin), his thirtysomething brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) and a pet llama named Tina, none of whom offer him much in the way of emotional sustenance. Grannie likes to spend her days racing dune buggies, Kip is perpetually surfing for love in Internet chat rooms and Tina refuses to eat her canned ham, dammit.
When an accident lands Granny in hospital, her place of authority in the Dynamite household is assumed by Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a failed football player who "almost made State!" in 1982 but who has accomplished little since. Rico is an ideas man, or thinks he is, with schemes about buying time-travel machines on the Internet and selling herbal breast enlargement treatments door-to-door.
The movie seems as if it is heading somewhere, but Hess and his co-screenwriter (and wife) Jerusha Hess are in no hurry to get to it.
Midway through this meandering tale, Napoleon signs on as campaign manager for a painfully shy Latino classmate named Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who decides to run for class president. Pedro has an uphill battle: He's possibly even geekier than Napoleon, and he's running against a popular blonde classmate (Haylie Duff).
But this Napoleon won't go meekly towards his Waterloo, and he's also found his own Josephine: Painfully shy girl-geek Deb (Tina Majorino), who wears her hair in a sideways pony tale.
The pleasures of Napoleon Dynamite lie not in the story, which eventually seems to stop of its own accord, but in the many comic bits enlivening the proceedings. These include Napoleon tearing a strip off Kip for refusing to bring his ChapStick to school and the inventive opening credits, where plates of food are arranged to spell out names.
Vote for Pedro. And check out Napoleon Dynamite.
You haven't seen anything till you've seen Napoleon Dynamite do the funky chicken.
Well, all right, it's not the funky chicken. You can see some funky chicken buried in it if you look carefully, though most of the moves show the influence of the Los Angeles dance masters Popin' Pete and Kool DJ Herc. Napoleon's freezes do need some work, and his back swipes and corkscrews could be a little smoother.
Still, you can't miss him. Not because he's a great dancer, but because he's about seven feet tall, he has a red Afro, his mouth is half open and his eyes are half shut, and most of the other boys like to beat up on him. And he's the most E.T.-looking white kid you ever saw.
Napoleon is big but weak, so soft he can't ball his hand into a fist. That makes him the clown prince of Preston, Idaho, and, as played by Jon Heder in the magnificent "Napoleon Dynamite," he's one of the most winning movie creations in years.
Of Napoleon it cannot be said that he marches to a different drummer. No, what he marches to is an instrument so unique it has no name and its melodies are beyond the capacity of the human ear to receive. Napoleon, maybe 17 (though Heder turns out to be 26), has a stretched-out, pillowy body that he cannot quite control and that keeps ramming into things. He has the eye-hand coordination of a Ukrainian weightlifter pickled in a vat of vodka. When he runs -- slowly, tragically, like a glacier melting -- he holds his elbows close to his body as if they're made of porcelain and will break. No wonder it's so much fun to crush him against a locker on the way to math class.
As a consequence of his advanced studies in exile, loneliness and disconnection, exacerbated by a family whose dysfunction is epic, Napoleon has cultivated a rather thorny personality. He's extremely acerbic; he's cruel and unsupportive; he's a chronic liar, a teller of self-aggrandizing tales so lame you wonder why he tries. ("My girlfriend's in Cleveland and she was going to fly in but she had a modeling assignment.") He's also transparently needy, throwing himself at those he suspects are snacks in the high school food chain. So what's not to love about a misfit so galactically misfitted as this?
It's a signal irony that a movie shot for $200,000 by a Mormon couple (director Jared Hess and his wife, Jerusha Hess, also the co-writer) in Idaho opens nationally on the same day as Steven Spielberg's $100 million "The Terminal" and that "Napoleon Dynamite" is every inch the superior product. It's tight, resonant, funny as hell, seriously bent and whacked, and also wonderfully healing.
That's because it's about diversity, really. Its text may be whiteness, but its subtext is blackness. It's about a couple of mutant white kids pushed to the margins of their own tribe who embrace black culture and find liberation, peace and dignity, to say nothing of emotional nourishment. It ends up saying, quietly and without strutting, this great American thing: We are each other and we are more alike than different, and we can profit so much from that connection.
Napoleon and his even more pathetic brother Kip (hysterical Aaron Ruell), a 32-year-old bespectacled pervert in Bermudas and knee socks trolling the chat universe for undercover officers to talk dirty to, live in a tiny house in a West so vast and barren it makes you yearn for a friendly McDonald's. The far-off mountains are picturesque but between here and there lies a Siberian plain the color of dead goats. The brothers are nothing, they have nothing, they do nothing, they are going nowhere slow. Their one connection to the galaxy is grandma, who in the early going breaks a bone in a dirt-bike accident (Granny has a life!) and so Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) -- a loser so big, his hobby is videotaping himself throwing a football to recall the glory day in 1982 when he almost got into the game -- moves in for the free lodging.
As a director, Hess's specialty is the deadpan announcement. He sets the camera down, lets his characters enter the frame at their own pace, make an announcement freighted with serious dementia, and then he cuts rapidly away, so that you're really laughing not at what was said, but at his refusal to underscore it in a conventional way.
Plot? Not a lot. But enough. Napoleon, desperate for friends but too repressed to be friendly, clumsily engages Pedro, a transfer played equally deadpan by Efren Ramirez; his outstanding trait is that he owns the only mustache in school. Pedro is also either foolhardy or clueless as he tries to date girls way up the social ladder and then finally runs for class president against Summer Wheatly (Haylie Duff), the coolest of the cool girls.
So you might say that the film is about the revenge of the nerds: how Napoleon and Pedro usurp the high school pecking order. But it doesn't concentrate on that. The Hesses' storytelling style is whimsical, episodical, in the end anecdotal, and almost, but not always, winning. We follow Kip's attempts to woo a woman in a chat room who turns out to be the savior of his life; we go with Kip and Uncle Rico as they try to sell Tupperware to farmers' wives; we go with Napoleon to a new job at a chicken farm and behold the horror of a million squawking eggbirds in a stalag of mesh wire under a corrugated tin roof.
Mistakes are made. A riff about a time machine that Uncle Rico orders off the Internet to get back to 1982 is ridiculous, even if Gries (son of the excellent director Tom Gries) is always funny, with his hairpiece and his entrepreneurial delusions and his eternal overestimation of his charm.
The manipulations by which it turns out that Napoleon must dance before the whole school in order to deliver the election for Pedro are quite thin, though it's organically rooted in the plot as part of Napoleon's secret plan to de-geekify himself by studying a hip-hop dance tape. But the movie builds to the moment when Napoleon, in his space boots and T-shirt, with his red foam of hair and his tiny eyes blown up by his aviators, must do the thing itself . . . the music comes on . . . the feet begin to twitch, the legs begin to shimmy, the hips begin to pump.
At that moment you realize how expertly Heder has hidden his true grace and how hard he has worked on finding a body and a style of movement for Napoleon and how totally convincing the artifice has been. Now, shedding it, he finds the magic. It's really the best six minutes of movie I've seen this year: the big ungainly boy seizing the moment, giving himself up to the music and transfiguring before our very eyes into something that, although still damned strange, is utterly compelling and even poignant.
"Napoleon Dynamite" rules.
Heart of dorkness
The movie that Garden State made me think most of, for some reason I haven't quite figured out yet, is Napoleon Dynamite. Both films are absurd in their own special ways, it's true, but they come at the absurdity from opposite ends of the spectrum. Garden State, for instance, has a scene with a guy who plays a knight at Medieval Times who speaks Klingon -- not on the job but as a hobby. Napoleon Dynamite would make the whole movie about that guy, but he'd have no idea what an enormous nerd he is, and that would be part of the joke.
If Garden State is about heightened reality, Napoleon Dynamite is about heightened unreality: one of its pleasures is the appreciative realization that comes from discovering that no matter how geeky you were back in high school, none of us approached the painful -- and hilarious -- nerdity of Napoleon Dynamite, who navigates the mean halls of Preston (Idaho) High with admirably oblivious aplomb. This endlessly and cheerily ridiculous film isn't one I was able to get truly emotional involved with -- it's too self-possessed and too self-conscious for that, and Napoleon is not a real warm kind of guy -- but it is highly intellectually involving in its schizophrenic, love/hate dissection of high school and adolescence.
See, director Jared Hess (who wrote the script with his wife, Jerusha) is working with a kind of negative nostalgia here, a kind of "Oh God high school was awful, wasn't it?!" combined with an inescapable desire to relive it. It might be called a retro high school dystopic fantasy, one that's half in love with the idea of yearning to be a teenager again and half eternally thankful that those days of dorkness are over. There is, on the one hand, Napoleon himself -- actor Jon Heder makes one of the most impressive feature debuts of recent years here, as does Hess -- who sketches imaginary creatures in his notebooks and is clueless about girls and dances with abandon and lies about girlfriends supposedly living in other states; he embodies, in his geeky freakiness, the uninhibited freedom and sheer terror of being a kid. On the other hand, there is Napoleon's Uncle Rico (Jon Gries: The Rundown, Twin Falls Idaho), a sad man still lamenting lost high-school football championships and wishing he could go back in time with the knowledge he has now as a loser of a grownup. There is, somewhere in the middle, Napoleon's thirtysomething brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell, another memorable screen debut), an overgrown kid who's finally making a real attempt to grow up. And this ambivalence about adolescence exists in a neither-here-nor-there physical and temporal setting, where people have cell phones and surf the Net but dress like it's 1984 and have top-loading VCRs and Dragonslayer posters.
It's as if Hess, as a clued-in adult, went back in time with the knowledge he has now, and figured out that life is just about screaming at the edge of an infinite abyss in the middle of New Jersey, or Idaho, and the infinite abyss is yourself. Even if you don't realize it.
Grade: B
The lowdown: A slice-of-life lament starring Napoleon Dynamite, the biggest geek in the geek town of Preston, Idaho.
The funky opening titles of "Napoleon Dynamite" announce a cult classic-in-the-making. Plates of nasty-looking high-school cafeteria cuisine are placed before the camera, the credits spelled out in food.
"Nappy D," as the already faithful call it, concerns a dyed-in-the-wool high school geek, a ferociously curly-headed mouth-breather who practices roundhouse kicks on the tetherball he bats around alone everyday during break. Napoleon, who talks with an irritated-sounding honk and marches around in a pair of black moon boots, is the genuine off-putting article. He makes Geekus Hollywoodium -- always played by someone such as Ben Stiller, whom we know to be fundamentally cool beneath his nerdy veneer -- look like the fraudulent genus we know it to be.
Napoleon (Jon Heder) lives with his spunky grandma and equally strange older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), who confirms the sad reality that young nerds grow up to become, not Bill Gates, but just older nerds.
When Grandma is laid up after a motorcycle accident, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) shows up to "baby-sit" the brothers, even though the pale, lisping, Internet-addicted Kip is 31. Uncle Rico, a former state football champ still reliving the big game, looks like a porn star circa 1975. He makes his living cruising the county in his orange and brown van selling, depending on the day and the clientele, sets of plastic food storage containers or herbal breast-enhancement cream.
Preston, the small Idaho town that serves as the backdrop, is as out of it as the hero. The place looks stuck in 1982. The houses are forlorn and the vast parched fields are shot to make them look like one more exasperating reality of Napoleon's irritating life (which includes the nightly feedings of a cranky black llama named Tina).
Jared Hess, the 24-year-old first-time director, is either shrewd or lucky to have landed the gifted Heder to star. His film is saved from cliche by Napoleon's put-upon mien; he knows he's a buffoon but accepts it with a haughty impatience, like some aged, cranky monarch forced to accept his infirmities. When new kid Pedro (Efren Ramirez) arrives at school and Napoleon is asked to show him around, he tells Pedro impatiently that he supposes they're going to be best friends now. Napoleon knows that it's the chore of the class loser to befriend the friendless new kid.
Pedro decides to run for student body president against the most popular girl in school, Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff), and this provides the underpinnings of the plot, but it's the least interesting part of the film. The set pieces, which feature Napoleon taste-testing milk as part of as a Future Farmers of America project ("I'd say this cow got into an onion patch") or moving chickens from one coop to another in an attempt to earn some cash, are small gems of deadpan lunacy and bring to mind director Jim Jarmusch.
The ending, while amusing and gratifying, is ridiculously pat, given what's come before. But you can't help rooting for Napoleon to triumph, and so he does. He remains true to his freakish, oddball nature; in an American high school, this is a heroic feat that's nigh well Napoleonic.
Grade: B
You can find 'em in every school, in no small number of American homes, at the workplace. They're oddballs -- introverts for the most part, who don't fit in except with their own circle of like-minded friends. If you're an oddball in New York, you may have no problem. If you're nerdish in Idaho -- in the sticks of Idaho at that -- you've got as much support as a potato useful for boiling only. "Napoleon Dynamite," a new film written by director Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess, is an amusing romp in and about a high-school in the tiny town of Presto, Idaho, the sort of place that's lily-white, though in one major situation a Mexican-American turns up -- where the kids get to the school by a bus that travels along rural routes. As in Alexander Payne's study of a high school in his "Election," a vote for student president informs the plot but only to some extent. However the election here is not transcendent: the picture can be taken as a comedy for its own sake, the sort that, were it a still life, it might appear in a New Yorker cartoon.
The ironically named title character (Jon Heder) cannot be mistaken for anything but a geek. He appears to go out of his way to be dumped upon with his now-unfashionable aviator glasses and a small reddish and curly Afro. In class time he often draws medieval characters and for exercise he fools around with a tetherball, socking it so hard that we're sure he imagines he's doing in one particular jock who in at least one case sees him in the halls and slams him against the locker. Outside of his own family, he's friendly with two people: one a Mexican-American named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) who accentuates his differences with the spud-fed whiteys in the school by sporting a mustache; and with a shy girl, Deb (Tina Majorino), who like some other introverts is skilled as an amateur photographer. While Napoleon's grandmother (Sandy Martin) is off-roading in the Idaho flats, Napoleon is watched over by his salesman cousin, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who also watches over the 32-year-old brother of Napoleon, Kip (Aaron Ruell), the latter spending hours each day in an internet chat room.
Hess's outlandishly character-driven story, then, is of off- center people, people who are mocked not only by the folks with whom they come into contact but at times by the writer-director himself. If Michael Moore were to do this as a mock-doc, he might have Pedro, Napoleon, Rico and Kip coming to the school with AK-47's or Uzi's, but this being a comedy, the ostracized get their revenge in more legal ways. The style which Napoleon uses as his friend Pedro's elections campaign manager brings to mind Jason Schwartzman's school play in Wes Anderson' "Rushmore." Ultimately, though, "Napoleon Dynamite" is an original that will find an audience tired of the action-adventure genre or of mindless slapstick comedy.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 stars out of 4]
EXCERPT: "Has a sweet momentum."
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
This summer's American lexicon will likely feel the impact of "Napoleon Dynamite," a small, independent comedy nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.
In the same way "Saturday Night Live" sketches introduced key phrases ("Isn't that special?") into everyday discourse, "Napoleon" may bring a geek slant to real-world conversation. If the film gains its deserved audience, expect to hear a volatile brand of dweeb-speak for awhile, puerile lamentations detonated with an eruptive whine: "Dang it." "Gimme the flippin' thing." "Maybe I will, gosh!"
Such square bellicosity is the province of Preston, Idaho, high-school student Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), a cross between the long-suffering Job and a clueless Butt-head (sans Beavis, and lacking Butt-head's defensive sense of irony). Napoleon is an ungainly, toothy, carrot-topped loser squinting through the miasma of his haphazard existence, angry but incapable of meaningful rebellion.
More fundamentally, Napoleon is mired, like a small child, in an unfocused, incomplete awareness of the parameters of his life. He lurches through his days -- barely tolerated, bellowing non-sequitur objections -- in writer-director Jared Hess' dry, cleverly stultified, sort-of-late-1970s rural culture, where purpose is negligible.
When a teacher asks Napoleon to report on a current event, the vaguely comprehending teen describes Japanese scientists firing explosives in Loch Ness. When urged to ask a girl to a school prom, Napoleon draws a hideous portrait of his would-be date and delivers it, promising there's "more where that came from."
Things change when creepy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a domineering hustler, moves in with Napoleon and overtakes the minuscule wills of our hapless hero and his older, feckless brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell). This disconcerting change finally gives Napoleon something solid to buck against. And it comes just as he (finally) makes a couple of friends, the moony Pedro (Efrem Ramirez) and the mousy but proud Deb (Tina Majorino), each of whom give Napoleon a reason to display loyalty and -- in a small, surprisingly profound and memorably funny act -- self-sacrifice.
Heder is magnificent, but the film's flat, eccentric tone is Hess' overarching achievement, an inclusive joke for appreciative viewers and an accessible variation on the willfully banal voyeurism of Paul Morrissey ("Trash").
Napoleon Dynamite
Rating: ** 1/2
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
Rating: **
The movies' continuing fascination with nerds, geeks, dweebs and dufusses represents a substantial strain of doubt in America's win-win culture. The nerd word first appeared in the positive-thinking fifties, in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo (1950), where it described a comically angry little humanoid creature. Newsweek cited nerd in 1951 as slang meaning a social misfit.
Since Ivan Reitman's Animal House (1978), films about bands of non-rugged individualists triumphing over conformists has been one of Hollywood's favourite comic fairy tales.
Napoleon Dynamite, director and co-writer Jared Hess's debut feature, is a distinctly indie-film take on the theme. The movie, which was acquired by Fox Searchlight for $3-million (U.S.) on the first weekend of the Sundance festival this year, has nerd chic. It takes its deadpan style and arch comic timing from Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), and its angry edge with the insufferably mediocrity of American suburbia of Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse.
Like a lot of high-school boys, Napoleon (inhabited by the extremely impressive Jon Heder) walks as though he carries a lot of tension in the pelvic area. He has bug-like aviator glasses, an unruly mop of orange curls, and is in a more or less perpetual state of wounded outrage.
Preston, Idaho, the director's home town, appears to be a place where a few prefab houses were dropped at random by airplanes onto the flat landscape. Napoleon lives in one with his grandmother (Sandy Martin) and older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who is in his thirties and more of a nerd than Napoleon. His social life consists almost entirely of Internet chat rooms. The town seems filed with the dumb, deluded and easily confused.
Napoleon's sleazy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to live with them when their grandmother has an accident on her all-terrain vehicle. Rico's a former high-school football player, who sells plastic food containers and breast-enlargement creams door to door.
At school, Napoleon befriends a dour new Mexican student named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and a shy girl named Deb (Tina Majorino). Together they lead a nerd insurrection, running Pedro for president at the school, and giving Napoleon a chance to shine in a dancing finale.
Love even comes to Kip, who earns a visit from his on-line friend, LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), from Detroit. Like Napoleon, he discovers that black culture may save Idaho.
This ridicule of people on the borderline of poverty, intellectual disability and opportunity isn't charitable, but Hess can also be extremely funny. Napoleon shows his sweet-talking gifts when he sits down with a girl in the cafeteria, looks at her milk carton and tries this ice-breaker: "I see you're drinking 1 per cent. Is that because you think you're fat?" There are also memorable comic images, such as Napoleon taking an election button from a popular student and throwing it down the hallway in disgust before turning and running away.
Hess makes a virtue out of minimalism with an artless shooting style but an impressive attention to painfully dowdy visual detail: Napoleon's wolf motif T-shirts and his fascination with medieval armour and swords, the uncle's Joe Namath hairdo, the orange and brown late-seventies interiors.
He's a talented director though his attitude toward his subject reflects a troubling, familiar, paradox: Everyone cheers for the underdog; no one really wants to be one.
Nerds of a different stripe take the court in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, based on the time-honoured high-school humiliation game where big strong boys make little weak boys cry so phys-ed teachers can weed out their sports teams. Dodgeball, written and directed by former advertising director Rawson Marshall Thurber, aims low and occasionally hits in its parody of the misfit sports genre.
This is the fourth Ben Stiller comedy this year (is he saving to buy his own studio?), which may be too much. He plays preening gymnasium owner White Goodman, who is determined to ruin a humble rival's business. Stiller, wearing a blond puffy wig and a Fu Manchu mustache, offers his most outlandish and strident turn since Zoolander. For the anti-Stiller contingent, there's the compensation of seeing him get hit repeatedly in the mug by flying red balls.
Dodgeball also features Stiller's wife, Christine Taylor (A Very Brady Sequel), as a lawyer, caught between two gyms and two men. She arrives to offer the foreclosure papers to Average Joe's, where she becomes enamoured with Peter (Vince Vaughn).
Average Joe's membership consists of a few unathletic types hanging out to avoid loneliness, who don't pay their dues. Peter's only way to save the gym is to raise $50,000 by winning a Las Vegas dodgeball championship, leading to a showdown with his rivals.
Much of Dodgeball feels competent but lazy. The nerds are barely distinguishable, except for one who thinks he's a pirate and says arghh a lot to no humorous effect. To boost the team's chances, and the movie's obscenity quotient, the team discovers an ancient dodgeball coach, Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn in a wheelchair with long hair), who agrees to train them by throwing wrenches at their groins.
After the sloppy first hour, the movie picks up as a TV-sports parody. The big game is broadcast on ESPN 8 (If it's almost a sport, we've got it here), with Jason Bateman providing some funny moments as a clueless TV colour commentator. There's also a very funny cameo by five-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, offering backhanded support for Peter's decision to give up. As a whole, though, Dodgeball feels far too smug about its underachievement to be a persuasive nerd movie: This is more a film by Hollywood frat boys slumming for some quick summer money.
Rating: * [1 star out of 4]
Proof that some folks would rather laugh at people than with them is provided in "Napoleon Dynamite," a comedy about the utterly clueless of Idaho -- clueless Idahoans? -- that had them rolling in the aisles at this year's Sundance Festival.
Whether "Napoleon Dynamite" has a similar effect on those outside the rarified air of the festival will soon be determined, as it receives one of the biggest releases ever for an independent film. That means people in Idaho will get to see it -- though the film implies they're so clueless they wouldn't make much of it even if they drove their tractors over it.
Directed by recent Brigham Young University graduate Jared Hess and cowritten with his wife Jerusha, "Napoleon Dynamite" may be the most condescending comedy ever to imagine itself being too cool for the room. Even those who find it insufferably smug may find themselves stifling a mean-spirited giggle, however.
Like early John Waters and Todd Solondz -- whose wonderful, insightful "Welcome to the Dollhouse" would appear to be an obvious, if misunderstood, inspiration for the Hesses, "Napoleon Dynamite" presents us with a collection of geeks essentially too stupid to live. But instead of empathizing with them, it sets them on the seat over the water tank and throws one ball after another at a target so big even Michael Moore might be able to resist it.
The Loser of Losers is the title character (Jon Heder), a high school kid with a thick red perm and thicker glasses who is continually being slammed into his locker, and who makes it exceedingly hard for us to feel any animosity for the bullies. He lives in a dump outside Preston, Idaho, with his grandmother and his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who would be even dumber than Napoleon if the dumbness scale went that low. While Napoleon is pursuing his interest in tetherball ("Sweet!") or attempting to stay out of the way of his nemesis at school ("Idiot!"), Kip spends his time on the Internet with someone he's convinced is his soul mate.
When grandma is hospitalized after a dune-buggy accident, the boys are left in the care of Uncle Rico (Jon Gries, who played a similar if more recognizably human character in "Jackpot" ), whose stupidity is compounded by his smarminess. (Never mind that Kip is almost 30; he's not ready for the responsibility of watching his brother.) Rico is self-employed selling herbal breast enhancer, which he is always willing to demonstrate on his door-to-door customers.
Meanwhile, at school, Napoleon befriends another outcast, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), and convinces him to run for class president against the archetypal popular blond cheerleader. They are assisted in this endeavor by a kinder, gentler female version of Napoleon, Deb (Tina Majorino), who has her own door-to-door business selling key chains.
If you are considering a move to Preston, by the way, you might want to consider putting up one of those "No Solicitation" signs.
You may not be surprised to know that in moments of crisis, Napoleon breaks into an awkwardly embarrassing dance, or that when Kip's soul mate shows up in Preston, she turns out to be a strapping homegirl from Detroit named LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery). Only the fact that everyone in the film is a ridiculous caricature saves it from charges of racial stereotyping.
Had Hess been able to muster even a minimal amount of human camouflage for his characters or a smidgen of originality in his storytelling, "Napoleon Dynamite" might have eked by on absurdity. Considering that Hess has said, with a straight face, that he never knew that Elvis Costello long ago used Napoleon Dynamite as a pseudonym and that he came up with the moniker on his own, we can also dismiss the suggestion that his interest in the characters here goes beyond ridicule. As it is, this is a lot like raising an ant farm just so you can set fire to it.
Grade: C+
Loser, geek, reject, weirdo and certifiable mouth-breathing social outcast, Napoleon Dynamite is someone you have to root for, even if he is caught in a thin film that relies alternately on cliches and cleverness.
With his awful red afro, his amazing ineptness at conversation and complete lack of skill or talent, Napoleon is the worst high-school nightmare and memory of the habitually insecure -- meaning most of us. At the same time, he serves as constant reassurance that as bad as any of us are or were, at least we were never Napoleon Dynamite.
Unfortunately, Napoleon Dynamite the character, as brought to life by Jon Heder, is far more interesting than "Napoleon Dynamite" the movie. In fact, this is the odd film that has a number of characters who somehow seem better than the environment they're in, a cast of unknowns in search of a script worthy of their potential.
But then, that they found themselves in this movie at all is something of a miracle. "Dynamite" is a low-budget, independent film that dares to be PG. No tortured, expletive-driven scenes of rape, no suicides or tragic accidents, no explosive revelations or flashbacks to prior indecencies. Instead of offering some grand statement of the soul, director-writer Jared Hess has made your basic high-school geek comedy.
Good for him. If only it wasn't SO basic. The town is Preston, Idaho; Napoleon is the youngest eccentric in a family of eccentrics (his parents are nowhere to be seen; there's no explanation for his name), and as such is the natural target of all the cooler kids (meaning everyone else) at school. He lives with his grandmother, who leaves early on a mission of irresponsibility, and his older, possibly even geekier brother Kip (Aaron Ruell, terrifically square). The family pet is a llama.
Napoleon, who's more sour than sweet and tends to converse in bursts of resentment, makes a friend when a quiet Mexican kid named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) moves to town. He also makes a fool of himself by asking a popular girl to the prom, while Pedro goes with the more appropriately strange Deb (Tina Majorino, yes, the little girl from "Waterworld"). Napoleon, Deb and Pedro become sort of an unspoken loser love triangle.
Meanwhile, sleazy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) has moved in with the Dynamite brothers, and Kip is continuing his Internet relationship with LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), his never-seen true love from Detroit. All the weirdness builds in predictable ways toward a predictable conclusion that's sweetly clumsy.
Eccentric loser characters, offbeat relationships, high-school clique cruelty, geek love; this is all familiar territory. What makes "Napoleon Dynamite" worth seeing is Heder's performance. His loser is truly a loser, with no apparent spark that will lift him above the popular kids later in life (unlike the classic nerds destined to be millionaire engineers). The way Napoleon suddenly breaks into Grouchesque runs, his essentially antagonistic speech patterns, his complete lack of social grace; Heder makes him an endearingly unlovable human mistake.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is an independent take on a Hollywood tradition, undermined by its cliches but saved by its performances. It's good for some laughs and that's all it wants to be, though it also offers some solace to losers everywhere: At least you're not Napoleon Dynamite.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 stars out of 4]
Ever since Paul Reubens' farewell performance at a certain Florida theater, we've been on the lookout for the next Pee-wee Herman. We may have found him in Jon Heder, who plays the geeky (and proud of it!) title character in "Napoleon Dynamite," a seriously deadpan addendum to "Revenge of the Nerds," "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" and other oddball teen fantasies.
Strange even by John "Hairspray" Waters standards, Napoleon is the undisputed hero of his own retro '70s universe. A senior at Preston High in rural Idaho, he doodles winged unicorns and daydreams of nunchuk battles and wolverine hunts. He buys off the rack at Goodwill and fancies himself one sly dude with the babes who, upon spying the moon boots, wonder just what galaxy this guy dropped in from.
At the least provocation, the gangly, curly-haired Napoleon emits long, exaggerated sighs, followed by the requisite eye-rolling. If you're not tuned in to his world, you are, excuse me, beyond help.
Were Napoleon one in a million, we could shrug and move on to "Road Trip" outtakes. Director Jared Hess, who wrote the story with wife Jerusha, allows us no such easy out. Formerly of Preston himself, Hess here recalls a prairie community in which his hero -- saints deliver us! -- seems almost normal next to his fellow students and family members.
Napoleon's 32-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) is an adenoidal twit who cruises chat rooms and, in hand-to-hand combat with Napoleon, squeals over a neck mole. Grandma (Sandy Martin) looks like a biker chick. Her favorite pastimes: a pet llama and all-terrain vehicles.
When Grandma meets with a racing accident, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) leaves his trailer and stops by to babysit. He's even more peculiar than his nephews. A door-to-door salesman who dreams of time travel, Rico relives his non-existent glory days before a video camera. And when he diversifies into breast-enhancer supplements, he creeps out half the girls in town.
Outsiders in their own right, classmates Deb (Tina Majorino) and Pedro (Efren Ramirez) naturally gravitate toward school "loser" Napoleon. Deb is so shy, she mistakes him for a take-charge kind of guy; Pedro, the town's token minority and the brunt of a lot of not-so-subtle slurs, is played as the kind of dull, heavy-lidded Mexican who is supposed to have been retired with the Frito Bandito. All of which makes his success at dating and school politics so confounding. But maybe that's the joke.
Structured as a series of school-days vignettes, "Napoleon Dynamite" touches on all obligatory rites of passage (first date, class election, etc.), but in a manner that's at once disarming and oddly reassuring. For all the abuse heaped upon him, Napoleon follows his dreams and perseveres, fulfilling Hess' message that the geek shall inherit the Earth.
"Napoleon Dynamite," which grew out of an award-winning short by Hess, was purchased at the Sundance Film Festival by Fox Searchlight, which added a couple of songs and a fun new eggs-and-sandwich credit sequence. These touches look almost mainstream next to the wildly eccentric comedy that follows.
My advice: Forget about "Saved!" and today's "DodgeBall." Their takes on the outsider feel glossy and disingenuous next to this no-frills celebration of cluelessness. If only Hess and Fox would lose the lethargic, monosyllabic Pedro. This guy is straight out of reruns of "Speedy Gonzales." It's amazing that a movie about the dangers of small-town intolerance would include such an insulting stereotype.
Meet Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), of coiled-spring red hair and coke-bottle-thick glasses. He spends class time drawing mythical creatures (badly), fantasizing about hunting wolverines in Alaska, wielding nunchucks and being cool with chicks. A social and athletic washout, (the poor slob can't even play tetherball), he lives in small-town Idaho (Preston, to be exact) with his dune buggying grandma (Sandy Martin), his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), and their pet llama Tina.
The William H. Macy-inspired Kip, whose rampant lethargy keeps him still at home at 30, shares his brother's eye problem and seems to spend his life in computer chat rooms, where he has met LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), the woman of his dreams (even though she won't send a photo).
When grandma falls off the dune buggy and winds up in the hospital, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a small-time hustler with bigtime pretensions, comes to "take care of" Napoleon and Kip, causing no end of friction.
These are strange folks, but Napoleon's problems are strictly standard -- left out of the cool cliques and clueless about interacting with girls, he seems doomed to nerdhood until the principal assigns him the task of showing new student Pedro (Efren Ramirez) the ropes.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is an odd bird. It looks like another in the long line of films about the horrors of high school, but it's equally a portrait of small-town Idaho, from which Director/co-writer Jared Hess hails.
The script seems more a series of vignettes taped together than a cohesive whole. The weak narrative thread wanders off the reservation at times to bring such scenes as those of Napoleon gathering eggs and serving as a milk taster for local farmers. Funny, but they seem tacked on.
The good news is there are many genuine laughs in this film, especially for the nerds or former nerds in the audience. Heder is endearing (if not especially likable) in a nerdy sort of way, and Ramirez shows promise as well.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is no "Election" or "Welcome to the Dollhouse," but this Sundance hit is a pleasant enough outing.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
'NAPOLEON Dynamite," a charming and often hilarious comedy about the ultimate high school nerd, is refreshing for its simplicity and its originality in a marketplace dominated by soulless blockbusters.
With a style that invites comparisons to such indie vets as Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and Alexander Payne, this Sundance favorite is an unusual mainstream effort by Mormon filmmakers: director Jared Hess and his wife Jerusha, who co-wrote the clever script, met as students at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City.
Their lead is another BYU alumnus: the unknown Jon Heder, who gives a perfectly pitched, deadpan performance as the nerdy, bespectacled Napoleon, who sports curly red hair and a wardrobe straight out of the late '70s, complete with Moon Boots (the unremittingly ugly furniture is also out of that decade, though the movie is ostensibly set in the present day).
Slight, whiny and always exasperated, Napoleon rides a girl's bicycle and lives on a farm in rural Idaho with his mostly unemployed older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who is conducting an Internet romance with a faraway black woman named LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), who may or not actually be a man in drag.
The brothers are looked after by their dotty, dune-buggy riding grandmother (Sandy Martin) and Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a macho bully and failed football player who hawks breast-enlargement products door to door.
Napoleon predictably doesn't get any more respect at high school, but he plows ahead with plans to run his newly acquired (and only) friend, a dim Mexican named Pedro (Efren Ramirez), for class president at their whitebread school -- against a popular blonde (Haylie Duff, Hilary's sister).
The other plot thread in this loose collection of episodes is Napoleon's fumbling romance with Deb ('90s child star Tina Majorino), who sells handicrafts and takes pictures at the mall.
The funniest scenes in what amounts to a smart, no-budget "Dumb and Dumber" have little to do with the storyline: Napoleon's faltering attempts at skateboarding and his sprinting in a tuxedo to pick up Deb for the prom after his ride doesn't work out.
"Napoleon Dynamite," a rare indie effort so innocent it carries a PG rating, is a little movie with a lot of heart and a lot of laughs.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
Napoleon Dynamite is a very funny sketch of high school nerds in rural Idaho. Although it is a live-action movie, it plays like a cartoon. It doesn't have a great plot or believable characters, but its deadpan performances and cinematic sense of humor earn it a strong recommendation.
Napoleon Dynamite and his 30-year-old brother Kip (Jon Heder and Aaron Ruell) live in their grandmother's house in rural Idaho. While grandma is out riding dune buggies, Napoleon has to feed the llama as part of his after-school chores.
Napoleon is probably one of the biggest losers at school, with his frizzed hair, half-closed eyes, steel-rimmed oversized glasses, and a lanky frame that he doesn't quite know how to inhabit (he runs without moving his arms). Endearingly, he's clueless about it. In his fantasies he's probably the coolest boy in school. He brags to the jocks about his summer shooting wolverines in Alaska, and his current events presentation is about a Japanese plot to blow up the Loch Ness monster, which the Scots counteract by invoking protective spells. Through it all, Heder never betrays a hint of anything but sincerity.
He's surrounded by supporting nerds, each with their own unfortunate hairstyles and foibles. Kip has the pocket-protector look offset by a wispy mustache. Napoleon's friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) shaves his hair off because it's too hot, then dons a '70s wig to cover it up with the help of their "glamour photographer" friend Deb (Tina Majorino), who sports a sideways ponytail. Napoleon's uncle Rico (Jon Gries), trapped in the 1980s by a failed high school football career, comes to look after the boys after grandma gets injured.
As much as we'd like to just watch these characters, movies demand a plot and a conflict, and Hess complies. Kip meets a girl on-line, La Fawnduh (Shondrella Avery), from Detroit. Pedro throws his hat into the ring for class president. Deb develops a crush on Pedro. And Napoleon scores a date with one of the cool girls (whose mother, led to believe that Napoleon is a "special" boy in need of a friend his age, insists on the date).
Once the characters are pigeonholed into their respective conflicts, the movie demands a climax and a resolution. And at this point, why not? The fun of watching these characters has waned since the first act. For the movie's finale, set at an all-school assembly, Napoleon does a dance in support of Pedro's candidacy. It's quite a finale, both impressive and funny, particularly from an awkward nerd like Napoleon who just assumes he's cool.
A fellow critic, Walter Chaw, ultimately criticized the movie. He said that unlike other underdog movies, Napoleon Dynamite looks down on its characters. He says the filmmakers put us in the position of the letter-jacketed jocks who mock and abuse them. Although I praise Chaw on his sensitivity, I have to disagree.
Chaw says that by staring into the fourth wall while a jock pushes Napoleon against the lockers (a shot you can see in the trailer), we the audience take the perspective of, and are guilty of pushing him into the locker. I say that Hess discovered a truism about comedy filmmaking: flat, stagey, symmetrical scenes that show the whole body are inherently funny. It's not a fourth-wall thing but a comedy staging thing.
Chaw also says the movie's Latinos are caricatures only good for their low-rider car. I say that rather than being blind to them or afraid of their culture, Napoleon accepts their culture at face value and integrates it into his life.
I saw Napoleon not as a loser to be mocked, but as a creative, funny kid -- the kind of kid Matt Stone spoke about when interviewed in Bowling for Columbine, the kind of kid who would grow up to be somebody cool, creative, and successful, who could have the last laugh by living well, by not growing up to be a cog as his tormentors seem likely to do.
At the very least, see for yourself. If you feel dirty, cruel, and complicit in mocking Napoleon, then trade your Movie Habit bookmark for Film Freak Central. But I think it's possible -- easy, in fact -- to laugh at Napoleon Dynamite without hurting anyone's feelings.
Grade: B+
Napoleon Dynamite is one of those vengeful nerd comedies that divides audiences into camps -- you will either laugh crazily at the misadventures of this Napoleon (Jon Heder) or you'll be appalled by them; you'll either feel guilty or insulted.
Napoleon is a high school student, of gangly mien and goofy aspect, with wads of untamable red hair and a heavy, open-mouthed breathing style that suggests intellectual dullness and social ineptitude. He is the sort of outcast who revels in his loneliness. There is a broad mean streak in this kid -- he seems as capable of inflicting damage as sustaining it. He is quick with his fists and cruel with his words.
Set in a time-warped Idaho where the primary colors of the 1970s have yet to fade, the film -- directed by Jared Hess, a recent graduate of Brigham Young University -- pushes the romantic geek comedies of John Hughes past the breaking point into cartoon surreality. Like a live-action Beavis and Butt-Head, Napoleon Dynamite is a movie by smart people about dumb people, and as such it runs the risk of defaulting to simple ridicule to tease out the requisite number of laughs.
As much as I might like to report that I was immune to the acid-drenched pleasures of this snarky little film, which has at its center a character who's somewhat less than genuinely human, I cannot. I like it, and because I like it I'm compelled to come up with a rationalization that allows me to retain a notional image of myself as a humane and sensitive person.
There is something well-observed in the way the movie piles up its tics and gestures and would-be catch phrases, something beyond the usual dynamic of condescension that drives the script. As ugly and antisocial and crude a caricature as this Napoleon is, there is something about him that engages our empathy. Somehow he sucks us in; we find ourselves along for his ride. Napoleon Dynamite does not work the way you think it must. It doesn't exactly invite us to laugh at the hapless and bewildered, but it somehow encourages us to identify with the same.
It may be that when we laugh at Napoleon we are laughing at ourselves, or at our vision of ourselves in our most unlovable moments. Haven't we all felt dull and awkward and undeserving? (Never mind that Napoleon is so insensitive as to seem insensate. Maybe underneath it all he's hurting.)
In any case, the movie works on a slightly deeper level than mere mockery; because we find ourselves touched when the core losers -- Napoleon and his 31-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) -- begin to bond with others of their species. Napoleon's outreach is limited to his fellow nerds, a quietly misfit shy girl (beautifully rendered by Tina Majorino) and a would-be student politician of Hispanic descent (Efren Ramirez) but one suspects these thwarted, abrupt relationships are at least as deep as those that befall the popular kids.
It may be as easy to overpraise Napoleon Dynamite as it is to dismiss it, for while the look is indie fresh, the humor is derivative -- much of the movie feels like Heder improvising as Napoleon, and the character could easily be transferred, without losing much poignancy, into a three or four minute hit-or-miss comic skit format. An archetype rather than a leading man, it may be possible for us to pour ourselves into Nappy D for the short run, but even an 82-minute movie might be too long for some.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
"Napoleon Dynamite" is an odd little film that's mediocre at best but has nevertheless managed to capture legions of devoted fans thanks to it's memorable characters and some wonderfully quotable dialogue. Count me among the fans, as "Napoleon Dynamite" ranks high on my guilty pleasures list.
Newcomer Jon Heder makes a dynamite debut in the title role, a geeky outcast of a kid just trying to survive high school and his weird family that torments him at home. There's his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) who is a tiny 31-year-old slacker who speaks with a gay lisp but nevertheless spends his days training to be a cage fighter and chatting with his online girlfriend in Detroit. And there's Uncle Rico (John Gries) a man so obsessed with his 1982 state football championship loss that he buys a time machine off the internet with the serious intention of traveling back in time hoping to convince the coach to put him in the game in the 4th quarter.
Napoleon's school friends aren't much better. The girl he likes (Tina Majorino) is a complete geek herself who sells boondoggle keychains door to door. And then there's Pedro, a soft-spoken Mexican immigrant who decides to run for class president against the most popular girl in school. His qualifications for office? He's the only guy in school who can grow a mustache.
But all of these oddballs and geeks pale in comparison to Napoleon himself. Tall and gangly, with an unfortunate red afro, coke bottle glasses and a perpetual sneer, Napoleon is one of the most memorable nerds in cinematic history. I'm surprised at how much I enjoyed watching Napoleon navigate his daily life. I don't know if I was laughing at him or with him, but I was certainly laughing during the movie.
The bottom line is that "Napoleon Dynamite" isn't a great film, but it's an auspicious debut by filmmaker Jared Hess and his co-writer wife Jerusha. And the real breakout star is Jon Heder, who has delivered a performance so cult-worthy that he may very well spend the rest of his life quoting this movie in order to placate his obsessed fans.
Movie reviews by Sean McBride, "The Movie Guy," are published Wednesdays and Fridays in the Port Arthur News. Sean the Movie guy appears Fridays on KFDM-TV, Channel 6 and Monday and Thursday evenings on KWBB-TV, News at Nine. For more reviews, check out www.seanthemovieguy.com
EXCERPTS: "Absurdist piece about a rural community of clueless cretins who careen through life like poorly played pinballs represents the definition of the comedy of condescension and ridicule. Lots of laughs for those who enjoy sight of bottom dwellers doing stupid things. Could easily be a pic that hits big at Sundance but can't find its way in the real world..."
"There are lots of laughs for those who enjoy the sight of bottom dwellers doing stupid things that make them look even more idiotic."
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 stars out of 4]
Napoleon Dynamite was a sensation at this year's Sundance Film Festival. After playing very successfully in art houses for a few months, it is now rolling out nationwide, complete with an additional 5-minute scene added for the wide release. (However, to see the extra scene, you have to sit through the entire end credits, the blue MPAA logo, and about four seconds of total blackness.)
Jon Heder plays the title character, a dorky high school student in Idaho. Napoleon is tall and lanky, with an unruly "hair helmet" and the type of oversized glasses that went out of style at least a decade ago. He's the kind of kid who is routinely shoved into lockers in the hallway at school. He is also prone to liking science-fiction and ugly iron-on T-shirts. Napoleon lies to make himself seem more well-adjusted than he really is; he will claim to have a girlfriend in another state and will insist that he has gone wolverine hunting with his uncle. No one believes him on either count, a fact he never seems to recognize. His conversation skills are often limited to one-word utterances like "idiot" and "duh." One of the funniest scenes illustrates the character's strange habits. During lunch, he places a handful of tater tots in his pants pocket for consumption later on.
Napoleon lives with his grandmother and his adult brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). Unlike Napoleon, who is at least vaguely aware that he's not like everyone else, Kip is blissfully ignorant of his own fashion-challenged scrawniness. He spends his days talking in chat rooms and planning his improbable future as a cage fighter. When their grandmother lands in the hospital after an ATV accident, the boys' Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) moves in to watch over them. He starts up a business with Kip in which they sell 24-piece sets of Tupperware. Kip uses the money to buy a bus ticket for his internet girlfriend.
There isn't a lot of plot in Napoleon Dynamite; instead, this is one of those slice-of-life character studies in which we glimpse into the world these people inhabit. A lot goes on in their lives. We see Napoleon's friendship with the laconic Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a new student from Mexico. Pedro doesn't fit in too well either, but he plans to run for class president anyway. The competition is a pretty, vacuous cheerleader named Summer (Haylie Duff). Then there's Deb (Tina Majorino), yet another misfit. She's so out of touch that she still wears her hair in a pony tail - on the side. She and Napoleon would seem to be interested in each other, but maybe not. Napoleon turns to his friends when he thinks his brother and uncle are ruining his life, which is constantly. They embarrass him, which is probably easier to cope with than embarrassing himself.
There's an interesting factor at play here. A lot of movies feature dorky characters who long to be accepted by the popular kids. In contrast, Napoleon seems to have as much contempt for his peers as they have for him. Never does he really express a desire to fit in. He almost seems to take a certain pleasure in his anti-social qualities. Just as the cool kids are irritated by his dorkiness, so is he irritated by their uniformity. It's not jealousy or resentment; he just really doesn't like the majority of kids in his school. That's an extremely original approach to take. Many of the film's laughs come from the way Napoleon so stubbornly refuses to adhere to the conventions of adolescence. Even when he gets a pity date for the school dance, he barely registers the fact that the girl skips out on him. Heartbreak would just be to foreign to him.
Napoleon Dynamite is a great comic creation, and Jon Heder deserves Oscar consideration for playing him. The actor totally gets inside this guy; never once do you feel like you're watching a performance. This is especially impressive during some of the more painful moments in which Napoleon fails to register events that should be humiliating for him. At the same time, you feel an undeniable affection for the character. Sure, he's dorky, and yes, there are times when his behavior is borderline obnoxious. But there's something strangely admirable about his fierce individuality. He likes himself, even if his peers don't.
For me, the joy of Napoleon Dynamite comes from seeing the misfits get a more honest treatment than they typically do. In a strange way, it's thrilling to see this kind of person get celebrated in a film. I have to admit: the character struck me as an amalgam of about two or three kids I went to high school with. I remember the qualities those kids shared with this movie's hero: the terminal dorkiness, the natural agitation toward "normality," and the surprising resiliency that seems totally unearned considering the circumstances. There was one boy at my school who looked not unlike Napoleon. He used to walk around challenging everybody else to a fight. My great-grandmother could have kicked this kid's ass, but he just kept provoking people. Why? Who knows, but he did it with all sincerity, apparently getting some kind of inner reinforcement. Are there really Napoleon Dynamites out there? Yes, there are.
If there's a message to be found in the film, that message would be that we all have skills of some kind. All we need is the right moment to reveal them. Our lives won't necessarily change much, but we can shine nevertheless, and that alone is important. In the film's climax, Napoleon delivers an ecstatically bizarre geek-dance that allows him a small moment of personal victory. At the end, he still doesn't fit in, and he's still a dork, but there's a small glimmer of hero inside of him anyway. It was always there; it just needed the right opportunity to present itself. This is ultimately a braver, truer, and more honest message than most movies about teenagers can deliver. Here's to the misfits.
Rating: **** [4 stars out of 5]
Treading firmly in the footsteps of films like RUSHMORE and GHOST WORLD, but ramping up the quirkiness a notch or three, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is a loveable oddball-goofball underdog comedy that both mocks and pays homage to the filmmakers' hometown of Preston, Idaho. The fact that Preston sits just above the border with Utah puts it firmly on the demarcation line between surreal and bizarre.
As odd as the entire population of Preston seems to be, however, few could be classified as odder than teenager Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder). When he gets up in the middle of class to discuss his weekly current event, and launches into a monologue about Japanese scientists attempting to blow up Nessie, and the residents of the Loch Ness area recruiting wizards to cast a protective spell on the lake . . . well, you know that Napoleon spends most of his time comfortably in his own little world, and we're just along for the ride. But while this frizzy-haired, slack-jawed, mouth-breathing geek appears to be borderline-retarded at first glance, looks can be decieving. In plenty of ways, Napoleon is a lot smarter than he lets on, and certainly smarter than most of those around him - including his even more geeky older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends time not looking for a job and cruising for babes on the internet, and his washed-up loser Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who sells tupperware out of his van and pines for the glory days of high school football.
There isn't so much a central plot in Napoleon Dynamite, but rather a loose collection of scenes that range from mildly amusing to fall-out-of-chair hilarious. But its organic and free-flowing nature is what makes it such a joy, and gives it a genuine-feeling slice-of-life view of Preston. In addition to dealing with his obnoxious uber-nerd brother and overbearing sleazy salesman uncle, Napoleon puts up with obnoxious jock bullies, befriends equally oddball new student Pedro (Efren Ramirez), and slowly comes to realize that he may actually like the very cute but equally quirky Deb (Tina Majorino, last seen as the little girl in Waterworld). When Pedro decides to run for class president, even offering protection to bullied kids via his tough-looking lowrider cousins, Napoleon becomes his biggest supporter and ends up clashing with the popular kids even more than before.
While Napoleon Dynamite benefits from a strong ensemble cast, and some sharp comedic writing from filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess, Jon Heder makes both the titular character and the movie work. Never have I seen a character with such a persistently lackadaisical gait, slackjawed look of bemusement, and entirely mirthless facial expression garner so many laughs. He's so good in the role, I fear he will probably be typecast because of it - which would be a shame, since he has a distinct gift for timing, delivery, and physical comedy that most contemporary teen-comedy actors lack. Still, if he ends up being remembered for only one role, this one is certainly no cause for shame. And while the film has the occasionaly arid stretch that seems a tad too self-indulgent in its musings on life in a whacked-out town like Preston ID, the scenes with Napoleon always bring things back into focus.
Ultimately, it's easy to like and relate to Napoleon, because we all knew a kid like that growing up - Hell, maybe we WERE a kid like that growing up, to one degree or another. I freely admit that I was a lot more like Napoleon than the pretty and popular and utterly vapid crowd that he bucks up against. This is a movie for the kid who ever thought about keeping a pair of nunchucks in his school locker, or preferred drawing pictures of sword-fighting barbarians to playing football. And even if you were a nerd in High School - at least you didn't have to be a nerd in Preston.