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Film
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Napoleon Dynamite
Although this husband and wife effort ignited the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, critic Larry Carroll is among those who feel it is more along the lines of a comedic implosion.
Sunday, June 13, 2004
By Larry Carroll
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The old saying goes that if you don’t have anything nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all, so let’s start this review with the following well-inten~tioned obser~vation: the opening credits for Napoleon Dynamite are terrific.
They might just be the best of the year, in fact: displaying the names of the actors and filmmakers involved with cute, fun little shots of food being placed on a table. A peanut butter sandwich appears on a plate, with someone’s name and position written in jelly; another name and title appears via a corndog and some ketchup. One by one, a hand places them on a table as a perky, quirky title song establishes a lighthearted, experimental mood. They’re everything opening credits should be – creative, unique, and keeping within the spirit of what the audience is about to see.
Then a huge sucking feeling can be felt as the movie begins and all that innovative, free-wheeling momentum is dragged out of the theatre. Within a handful of moments, it’s replaced by the sad realization that you’re trapped in your seat for the next hour and a half, watching a self-aware, condescending film led by an actor doing a caricature that falls somewhere between the cartoon character Butthead and Poindexter from Revenge of the Nerds.
Napoleon Dynamite is the name of that character, an angry, dorky, hopelessly clueless loner as performed by first-time actor Jon Heder. Napoleon wanders around Preston High School breathing through his mouth, with his eyes barely open, telling other students that he knows how to use numchuks as they take turns slamming him into his locker.
At home, things aren’t much better: his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell, also in his debut) is an emotionless, buttoned-up recluse who spends his days selling Tupperware and hanging out in Internet chat rooms; Uncle Rico (Jon Gries, Jackpot) has some detachment issues with his high school football career and has evolved into someone who seems one step away from child molestation; and Grandma (Sandy Martin, Jawbreaker) is the only seemingly normal person in the household, and she skips the scene a few minutes into the movie.
After a long time immersing the audience in the bizarre world of Napoleon Dynamite, the film finally gets around to some semblance of a plot revolving around the teenager’s desire to help his quiet friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez, The District) get elected class president. To do so, the duo will have to overcome the powerful support of popular girl Summer (Haylie Duff, Hillary’s big sister) and figure out which of them should end up with fellow outcast and part-time Glamour Shots photographer Deb (Tina Majorino, Waterworld).
First-time director and co-writer Jared Hess (a 24-year-old Brigham Young University dropout with a $500 student film that got him into Hollywood and whose story is probably far more entertaining than that of Napoleon Dynamite’s) is a gifted director who simply can’t rein in his own desire to out weird everything else around him. Every character in the script he concocted with his wife Jerusha is extreme (no normal people are around to contrast them), every set piece is purposefully awkward (a wall telephone is placed too high for no apparent reason) and most of the character’s motivations make sense only to them. Like a confused film school student, Hess is happy to pay homage to David Lynch, The Coen Brothers, Alex Cox, Terry Zwigoff, Harmony Korine and a dozen other directors, but doesn’t have enough passion to say much of anything in his own voice.
Without his ability to tap into the unconscious and tell a story based on raw emotions, David Lynch would just be a guy who likes to have a llama walk through his scenes for no reason other than satisfying his own absurd sense of humor. When Napoleon walks over to his fence to feed his pet llama, that’s exactly what Hess has reduced himself to – there’s no point to it other than to say, “Look, a llama!”.
And while that kind of unrealistic self-indulgence may be acceptable in small doses, in this film it’s strung together in huge piles of nonsense – a bike pulling a guy on roller skates, a man shooting a cow, a character who shaves his head and then decides to wear an ill-fitting wig to cover his shame – that none of us are likely to see in real life, that have nothing to do with this film’s plot, and that do little to make the characters more endearing to us. Anybody could take an old man and make them walk through a scene dressed as an astronaut with no pants on and carrying an armload of Twinkies – but being able to establish a reason why we’re seeing it is what separates the Coens and Richard Kelly from wannabes like Gregg Araki, Olivier Assayas and Hess.
What’s worse, the central character is an underdog that you very well may not feel like rooting for. Napoleon is a bitter, miserable soul who spends most of the movie complaining while he takes turns putting down those around him and serving as his own worst enemy. Hess wants you to identify with him as an outsider; he wants you to hope that Nap and Deb end up together and, to a lesser degree, that Uncle Rico finds love with a severely underdeveloped character whose daughter goes to Preston High.
The audience is also supposed to hope that Pedro wins the election, apparently just because he’s a mild-mannered minority and his competition is a corn-fed blonde with a smile on her face. At the end of the day, none of these plotlines is adequately built up or paid-off – instead, we just get more shots of weird stuff and pratfalls.
Napoleon Dynamite is likely to be billed as a cult classic, and that’s fine, but understand that there are two types of cult movies: those that you only need to show someone to make them love, and those that polarize audiences and become noteworthy by so fully pleasing fifty-percent of the people who see it that they go on to become rabid fans. Underperforming gems like Heavenly Creatures, Office Space and Dazed and Confused fall into that first category, while films like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, the Highlander series and this fall into the second. These are the films that polarize audiences – that some will memorize every word of as if it were scripture, while others will come out cursing the name of the director, his family, and his family’s neighbors.
The film does have some redeeming qualities, including a minority lead character, a welcome (if unnecessary) sequence scored to the song from the “A Team”, and the refreshing look of a movie that was actually shot on location, in Idaho no less. Those things can only bring a film so much goodwill, however. Napoleon Dynamite is a movie whose big emotional moment is supposed to pivot on a scene with the lead character up on stage, dancing wildly as a crowd stares at him in confusion.
Like Nap, his film flails away with a refreshing enthusiasm at first, but ultimately gets its music shut off without providing much of anything except an unfunny freak show.
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