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Nappy D's Got Solar Energy Review by Gregory Freitas Nutshell: Napoleon Dynamite is the strangest, funniest teen geek comedy since Welcome to the Dollhouse. Not only does it get funnier with successive viewings, it gets funnier just thinking about it while staring idly out a window. (You can forget about ever reading the word "talons" again without breaking into laughter.) Napoleon is a guaranteed cult classic with eternal life ahead of it on DVD and television. Sidebar: Director Jared Hess is the next hyped young director to make a huge splash on a tiny budget. Tetherball, mainstay of playgrounds everywhere, can theoretically be played by more than one person. Usually though it's a refuge for loners seeking to avoid the trauma of the more socially interactive games, such as your Kick Ball, or your Four Square. It's no surprise then that Napoleon Dynamite, the titular geek from rookie director Jared Hess' excruciatingly funny new comedy, is a tetherball aficionado. Part of what makes Napoleon so spectacularly funny though is that he isn't just your typical loser. He is a loser without peer, a loser's loser. He makes the "Mathletes" from "Freaks and Geeks" look like Prom Royalty. And what makes this particular geek so memorable (besides an eerily un-self-conscious performance from actor Jon Heder) is his singular unlikeability. For the first half of the movie we delight in watching him get beat up because we'd like to beat on him as well. Slowly though, vaguely compassionate human impulses emerge. He makes friends with the new kid (Efren Ramirez, gleefully unafraid to toy with non-PC stereotypes). He kinda, sorta, maybe, develops a crush on a girl at school (Tina Majorino, indelibly trafficking in glamour photography and hideous key chains). And mostly, he seeks to avoid his even weirder, even more unlikeable older brother Kip. (Aaron Ruell's portrayal of the 30-something brother who not only still lives at home--he still needs a baby sitter--is surreally magnificent.) The plot in Napoleon Dynamite is structured in the same way as the plot in Mean Girls, and The Girl Next Door, and frankly, every other teen comedy since the dawn of time: the trials and tribulations of the school year. But only in Napoleon Dynamite will you find the teenager screaming into the phone for his older brother to bring him his ChapStick. That Napoleon the movie is as much an underdog as Napoleon himself is part of its charm. Made for half a million dollars scraped together from family and friends, and featuring his chums from BYU film school, Hess' film recalls that other famous BYU alum, Neil LaBute. But where LaBute's comedies continue to be filled with misogynist loathing, Hess' film is ultimately good natured. And whereas LaBute still has no clue where to place the camera (he's a mediocre director trapped in a great playwright's mind), Hess' film shows a tremendous deadpan visual wit. Even the opening credit sequence fashioned from cheesy packaged foods and school supplies is unique. It's tempting to lump Dynamite, which opens nationwide on June 18, in with other teen losers Max Fischer (Rushmore) and Dawn Wiener (Welcome to the Dollhouse), but that would be missing the point entirely. Neither as hip-to-be-square as Rushmore, nor as purposely bleak as Dollhouse, Dynamite closes with a transcendent moment of hope for our hero, which suggests that--maybe--life after high school might not be nearly so terrible. And at that point in one's life, what more can you ask for? Which is not to say that Napoleon Dynamite has something for everyone. It's ultimately an odd and rather difficult little indie which certainly requires--and rewards--a little patience. Napoleon Dynamite aspires to so little that it succeeds handily, and so it's tough to predict what's to come for the young director. But this is one heavily-promoted Sundance debut that is actually worth the hype. Don't miss it. |
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