It was a bold move to make NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, a wry and sober comedy about family neglect and social ostracism that is deeply, truly funny. This is a film that dares to delve into the realms of the truly unlikable and to then go on to make the audience care about them. Maybe not enough to share a table with them in the high school cafeteria, but enough to want things to work out for them. Or as well as things can work out for people with the social skills of a zebra mussel.
Napoleon (Jon Heder) lives in a parallel dystopian universe somewhere in rural Idaho, where life is as tough as the landscape is spare. His thirtysomething brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), resplendent in khaki shorts, sandals and white socks under his slip on sneakers, spends his days in online chat-room while dreaming of overcoming his gerbil appearance by becoming a martial arts threat. Their grandmother, perhaps understandably, is a woman more interested in her pet lama and her dirt-bike racing than in them. When Grandma takes a spill during a particularly tricky dirt-bike maneuver, she calls in Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who has been reliving his last college football game since the he played it in 1982. This committed carnivore is an equally committed loser with bizarro Rat Pack fashion choices. When not wolfing down steaks and making life even more uncomfortable that usual for Napoleon, hes dragging Kip into questionable entrepreneurial endeavors, such as the Bust Must herbal enhancer. Meanwhile, academic life in the local high school consists of being slammed against his locker by the jocks and spinning wild tales of numchuck prowess and fashion model girlfriends for anyone who gets within earshot. When the new kid, Pedro (a spookily deadpan Efren Ramirez), arrives, Napoleon suddenly has a friend, sort of, and the natural order shifts just a bit into uncharted territory and uncertain waters.
Jared Hess, director and co-writer with Jerusha Hess, has created a low-key excursion into the cinema of isolation; made manifest the inner life of the geekiest of the geeks, the nerdiest of the nerds and discovered that angst is hilarious. Its a static place where every day is like the day before and only an imagination that transforms reality makes it all palatable. His shots are equally static, enclosing his characters in spaces into which they never quite fit proportion-wise, underscoring their misfit status. His genius is to focus almost as obsessively as Napoleon does on his various skill sets, on the minutiae of small-town life and its inherent eccentricities as lived by the rejects too far gone for any clique to offer refuge. A chicken farmer for whom Napoleon re-roosts chickens, foisting off on him a lunch of fly-ridden sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs washed down with something Id rather not go into. Theres the carefully studied boredom of his classmates when he presents his current event topic for the week, the one that involves the Loch Ness Monster, Japanese scientists, and Scottish wizards. Each indignity swallowed with a shrug that barely conceals the gurgling resentment that blows intermittently and with an anger that is as tentative as everything else our guy tries. Paradoxically, his Napoleon retains a zest for life that nothing in that life seems to justify. Thats the essence of his appeal and of the surreal absurdity of the film.
Heder never tries to win us over by going warm and fuzzy. He remains resolutely off-putting throughout, slack-mouthed beneath his wreath of wiry hair, speaking with a defiant monotone that expects to be either ignored or assaulted, and using a gait that involves not quite moving his arms and remaining ramrod straight even while running. Its the absolute seriousness with which he imbues Napoleon, though, that is the most striking. Each moment is lived at a fever pitch of laconic melodrama.
There isnt much of a plot. Its more a series of vignettes that segue into each other, punctuated with the oddities of the outcast, be it a putative time-machine that inflicts the sort of injury that might hinder future generations, or Napoleons particular genius for discerning the defects in milk during a Future Farmers of America tasting competition. Theres a school election with Pedro making a spectacular underdog bid for class president against the reigning teen angel (Haylie Duff), and a school dance that both serve to bring up short different protagonists with varying degrees of fairness. And, of course, theres romance. Even geeks have hormones, and the flat-line longing that Napoleon develops for the nerd princess with the not quite perky pony tail (Tina Marjorino) is at once poignant and, well, just a little nauseating.
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE exists in that rarified world of Alan Coxs REPO MAN or Jim Jarmuschs DOWN BY LAW. Its a world very close to ours and yet, uniquely its own, fluttering just outside reality, but reflecting it all too sharply.
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