I am convinced that Napoleon Dynamite is the zenith of the post-alter-John Hughes teen comedy, defying normal conventional fare such as Mean Girls or The New Guy and providing audiences with a clearly defined sense of self, despite its self-less characters and story. Napoleon Dynamite fits into no regular mold, instead resting upon quirky visual themes, sub-genre dialogue, and situations that play to no one particular methodology. It rests upon the notion that it exists within the confines of its own rules and constrictions, which plays havoc with the world of the real; surreal and funny, but in a realistic way.
Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is a high school kid with a mop of goofy, orange, tangled hair, glasses, and a beavered stare of drugged consistency. He spends his time drawing fantastic composite creatures, poorly, and often with unintended comedic effects. He lives with his thirty-two year old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) who types for hours on end with “babes” on Internet chatrooms. Their grandmother goes away for a fling with a boyfriend, leaving the two brothers in the hands of their erstwhile, steak-chomping Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a mealy-mouth salesman who has dreams of travelling through time to 1982, the year of his football championship loss. Rico ropes Kip into selling tupperware to housewives, while Napoleon fumbles through the perils of school as one of the geeks, a constant target for abuse. Napoleon takes it all with his toothy open-mouthed stare, responding occasionally with outbursts of pure, unbridled–and for him, unintended–hilarity.
He meets Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and they become friends through near inaction on both their parts, sort of falling into it, as it were. Together they scheme to catch dates for the dance, and propel Pedro through the ranks of underdogs to become the class president, winning through an incomprehensible dance routine put on by Napoleon himself, a joyously rendered, spontaneous explosion of limbs and torso contortions. While enormously funny, the filmmakers do the movie a disservice by lingering on the unscripted action a little too long. Napoleon’s electoral rescue nets him the girl who he may or may not be attracted to, played by Tina Majorino. Everything ends in a rather sing-song smooth manner, belying the tone of the otherwise offbeat film, a bookend to what should have been more open and free. Nevertheless, it is well played by the characters, and provides a few more laughs for audiences that, these days, aren’t usually offered so much.
Napoleon Dynamite is both hilarious and interesting, made mostly possibly by Jon Heder’s outbursts of frustration and bravado, his outrageous choices in apparel, and his not-quite devil-may-care attitude. Something is boiling underneath the hair and badly drawn sketches, something independent and masculine, though understated and misunderstood by people like the school bullies or Uncle Rico. Napoleon is his own individual, his own man, and he is only made stronger and more interesting by the oddballs with which he surrounds himself. He deals with the world and his problems through unconventional self-reliance, made easier by his isolation from “mainstream” society and willingness to experiment with life. A hilarious thrift store purchase alone nets him a kind of goofy aplomb, giving him the ammunition for the film’s climax and wrap-up ending.
Very few films come along that meet both a generational need and provide much needed comedic entertainment that falls squarely in the realm of the surreal. Past films that have accomplished this fairly well are Better Off Dead, an early John Cusack vehicle, and the more recent Wet Hot American Summer. Napoleon Dynamite strays outside the lines of conventional teenage comedies, which rely on the usual sex, angst, and future thematic elements to drive the stories; instead, it explores the shallow waters of high school geekiness, generational differences, and the often untouched love of friends. Though it waxes a bit on convention toward the end, Napoleon Dynamite is a fantastic comedy, offbeat and unfettered in its garish display of the weirdness that is epitomized in a smalltown USA teenager.
With an audience ready to laugh, the film is even better. The stiffs and Serious Sams can stifle the creative outpouring of hilarity this film offers, but an accomodating and engaged audience will add to the experience of watching.
Fringe Rating: out of 5