*** (out of ****)
Starring Jon Heder, Jon Gries, Aaron Ruell, Efren Ramirez, Diedrich Bader, Tina Majorino, Haylie Duff, and Shondrella Avery
Directed by Jared Hess & written by Jared and Joshua Hess
2004
86 min PG
“Napoleon Dynamite” is a celebration of being awkward, gawky, and totally ignorant of what’s “cool” at the worst possible time: childhood. The title character is one of those movie people you’ll find yourself impersonating, despite all your best attempts not to. He’s a walking disaster area of curly hair, a perpetually slack jaw, a hopeless wardrobe, and warped speech patterns that you can’t resist imitating after the movie. He is bitter and mean, because the world was mean to him first, and not a day goes by that someone does not slam him bodily into his locker. Napoleon (Jon Heder) isn’t very bright, he knows too much about “Dungeons & Dragons,” he draws too many unicorns, and he has the un-athletic person’s fascination with kung-fu. His only method of emoting is to exclaim “gah!” in impatient desperation. Screenwriters Joshua and Jared Hess should receive some kind of award just for cooking this freak up out of the spare parts of all the losers they knew growing up. Two of their models probably looked at them every morning in the mirror.
The movie tests our limits for compassion and empathy, and if you pass the test, you’ll actually feel quite good about yourself and more tolerant of others. “Napoleon Dynamite” makes no attempts, through story, music, or other cinematic trickery, to make us like Napoleon. (Part of me is not looking forward to overwrought soundtracks trying to throttle ascent out of me about how Kinsey, Ray Charles, and J.M. Barrie were all “great men.”) Director/co-writer Jared Hess simply points his camera at Napoleon—the only way we know this is a comedy is because it’s so often in long shot—and let’s the poor loser put his own head in a noose for us. We never see Napoleon’s subjective view of the world and he never tells us what he’s really thinking. Yet, somehow magically, we come to like him. When he threatens an overbearing jock with “I’m the only one here who knows the secret illegal moves the government teaches its ninjas!” we actually find ourselves admiring him. Despite, or perhaps because, movies like “Napoleon Dynamite” refuse to be nice to us or throw us any bones about their heroes, we come to like them even more.
“Napoleon Dynamite” is a story-less series of uncomfortable long shots, awkward pauses, and buzzing flies. It’s not only set in the middle of nowhere—one of those big, square states like Montana or Iowa or something—but in a strange non-specific era trapped in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, and early ‘90s, populated by children in a limbo age group. Napoleon looks in his late teens, rides a bus with grade schoolers, goes to school with 30-year-olds, and plays elementary school-style kickball. Napoleon’s older brother (Aaron Ruell) spends hours on the internet, via a computer so clunky and outdated that it couldn’t possibly even spell the word “internet” except in all capital letters.
In the same way that Hess never tries to push us toward liking or disliking Napoleon, he has adopted a tone of detached ambivalence about this strange never-neverland, which we can only assume represents his childhood. Nostalgia is mixed with embarrassment when it comes to all the clothing and music from the 1980s. A telling shot features Napoleon, his best friend (Efrem Ramirez), and their potential love interest (Tina Majorino) at the school dance, not dancing, just watching with their backs to us, while all the other kids sway to “Forever Young.” No, not the Rod Stewart “Forever Young,” the Alphaville version.
As Napoleon is beset by grinning jocks and poofy-banged girls named Trisha and Summer, watch for some peculiar tricks with ethnicity: “Napoleon Dynamite” doesn’t for a minute equate the sufferings of white outcast-loser-dork people with, say, racist immigration laws or centuries of slavery. But it does say that the oppression comes from the same place. Two scenes are worth mentioning. The first involves Napoleon’s best-and-only-friend Pedro Sanchez (Ramirez), who is a newly-immigrated Mexican kid who is practically Napoleon with an accent and Catholicism. Poor Pedro is baffled about why he’s in trouble for making a pinata in the shape of his opponent in a race for class president.
Second is the climax of the film, in which Napoleon supernaturally wins over the student body on Pedro’s behalf after Summer (Haylie Duff) gives a chirpy, empty speech. The popular white girl is what these children have been told again and again is what’s good and preferable. Is it any wonder they end up reaching out to black and Hispanic cultures—or at least a pop culture, gangsta rap, magazine cover version of them—the way Napoleon and his brother do? The movie’s villain is Napoleon’s Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who is as big a loser as Pedro, Napoleon, and his brother, but who refuses to see himself as anything other than one of the “cool people.” His fatal flaw is that he tries to appease his oppressors and not squirm out from under them.
There are those who will see and enjoy (or dismiss) “Napoleon Dynamite” as simply 85 minutes of making fun of a freak. True, the movie does that a lot, but being laughed at as an outsider and never understood is the day-in, day-out reality of being Napoleon Dynamite. Maybe it’s part of the movie’s strategy to test our ability to sympathize. I tried to hold myself above “Napoleon Dynamite.” And then I found myself saying “gah!” and “idiot!” in Napoleon’s spurts of nasal exasperation. That was that.
Finished Thursday, January 27th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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