Napoleon Dynamite

directed by Jared Hess
written by Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess
 
         I have been known to make people laugh. Humor may not be an inherent trait I possess but occasionally on accident or purpose, I feature some comedic ability. Not everyone can be funny. If your mother ever told you that you could do anything you set your mind to, she probably has no sense of humor. Or maybe that was her idea of a joke. Some mothers like to put their kids through emotional hell.
          Charlie Chaplin said that, “to truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!" After all, he was the sad clown. Maybe I could be the sad clown. I’ve already dated some girls that were too young.
          Plenty of comedians are just not funny in everyday routine but exhibit genius on stage or on camera. The complete opposite occurs with at least one friend of yours: innately funny, he or she lacks the talent or style for performance. Typically such friends are best with specifically inclusive jokes or witticisms. On the other hand, Zeppo Marx was likely the funniest brother and clearly inhabited the capacity to perform but his three distinguished elders left him without room for a style of his own. His untimely luck was not his fault but a fate that would later benefit heart patients and bicycle collectors.
           Napoleon Dynamite has been known to make people laugh but it is not a funny movie. Despite achieving the three comedic loopholes (or exceptions), Jared Hess fails to make a success of any. Instead he attempts a fourth device in which style and performance substitute for absent humor. The script, by Hess and his wife Jerusha, relies on deadpan dialogue that might have worked had it not been executed with such haughty demeanor. Duh.
           Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is the undue successor to Arnold Poindexter, Dawn Wiener and Max Fischer without cause. He has no revenge, rapist or Rushmore to drive him toward anything more than episodic awkwardness. When he does become involved in the campaign for his friend Pedro’s class presidency, there is no passion and in following the brilliant high school politics of Alexander Payne’s Election, the whole occasion is a lackluster aside in an already lifeless story. That Napoleon’s grand finale of support is met with great reception is contextually unconvincing and highly doubtful. I was reminded of my own running for vice president: I was no more popular than Napoleon and so rather than making a speech, I lip-synched the Joe Walsh song “Vote For Me”. My stunt was met with a similarly shocked adulation (minus the ovation) but not a lasting impression and my ballot results were less than favorable.
                Not much else in Napoleon Dynamite holds credible. There are no characters, for instance, only caricatures. Once Diedrich Bader appears with an outlandish voice act unqualified for even the most amateur of comedy troupes, all confidence in Hess’ sense of atmosphere is lost. The rest of the cast is directed as if rejects of a Terry Zwigoff project. It is no wonder that Hess is interested in adapting his film into a cartoon series. Odds are he’s already contacted Daniel Clowes to draw the thing.
         Jon Gries’ Uncle Rico would be welcome elsewhere, at least. As a man admittedly trapped in 1982, the year his high school could have gone to State if only he’d been put in, he has a genuine charm and appearance but none of the contrast necessary to stand out. The whole movie seems trapped in 1982 and without mention of Internet chatting I would forget that Rico is supposed to be out of place, out of time. Equally blurred is the relationship between Napoleon and the rest of his school. He may appear out of touch compared to our own standards but the rest of his school’s students likewise appear tacky and uncool. The girls all look like they belong in junior high, the boys in college. Hess almost creates a universe for these people to live in, but I honestly think he wants us to relate more veritably to the film than he allows for.  
           It isn’t so much that each individual event is impossible. Hess states in interviews that his mother embarrassingly confirms specific events, but my disbelief is with the exaggeration and assemblage in its delivery. Plus, some of the happenings like Napoleon’s calling home for emergency Chapstick, regardless of its basis on Hess’ brother, are nothing more than inside jokes, helping neither the characterization nor the plot in any way. It is great that the filmmaker can, as Chaplin suggests, take the torment of his past and play with it. Great therapy comes with self-derision. But this isn’t memoir and the audience is no more laughing with him than both are laughing at something completely detached.
          I might have known before seeing Napoleon Dynamite that it is a forced effort from the same mindset that thinks absurdism is as easy as writing random nonsense in a composition book, mistaking the fact that chance cannot be intentional. It should be up to the audiences over time to decide which, if any, dialogue is memorable; quotes appearing in preliminary print ads found in Entertainment Weekly make me wonder why Fox doesn’t just put a laugh track on the film. But it is like Hess might have dreamed: each costume design, each quirky staging of action and above all, each line of dialogue arriving with ambitions of grandeur in place of virtuosity. For a movie with the tagline, “He’s out to prove he’s got nothing to prove,” Napoleon Dynamite sure seems bent on proving its own hilarious importance.
           Comedy typically comes with intent so where lay the difference between effortless humor, successfully arduous humor and, in the case of Hess, labored vanity?  Taste and sense of humor may be subjective but some things will always be certain. Delusional saps continue appearing on “American Idol” without talent and we laugh, not because of humor but because of discomfort. Comparatively, bad comics on “Last Comic Standing” make us cringe instead of laugh, despite similar discomfort. Napoleon Dynamite is receptive to both reactions as people laugh at their discomfort with the character and cringe at the director’s effort to make us laugh. While Jared Hess should find a lucrative career making comedies in the new Hollywood with its insistence that cringing and laughing go hand in hand, I urge him to walk away and check out David Seltzer’s depressingly unfunny Punchline. He might find a mirror image in the Sally Field role.

Expectation Key


there's no possible way we will even see this

we'll eventually see this but we aren't really expecting much

anticipating the release of this one but we're sure to be left unsatisfied

such high expectation of this film only leaves room for disappointment