Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

Napoleon Dynamite: 2004, dir. Jared Hess. Seen at Alamo Village (October 2).
Okay. Hands up. Who has seen Napoleon Dynamite?
Okay. Who liked it? You did?
Why, in God’s name, why?
And why did some of you tell me to see it? Were you drinking? Were you partaking? Did you have your hand up someone’s skirt? Were you suffering from Friends deprivation and desperate for some sitcom, any sitcom, to make you laugh?

Hell, this wasn’t even a good hands-up-the-skirt movie. I’ve been to the movies in the past to see lukewarm comedies that were sporadically amusing and inoffensive and in the lulls you could make out with your date. Like that Chris Farley movie that time that whats-his-name took me to see, Tommy Boy. I had to look up the title, it was that unmemorable, but at least you didn’t sit there waiting for the movie to end and realizing that since you were at Alamo Village and you’d ordered food, you couldn’t walk out on the film because you didn’t have the bill yet for your dinner.
My boyfriend said afterwards that he was trying not to act too restless and bored and annoyed because he didn’t want to spoil the movie for me, since he thought I might be enjoying it. I busted out laughing. That’s why he didn’t do anything when I grabbed his leg and started rubbing it in an attempt to provide a distraction to myself from the unfunny antics on the screen. We’re both so damned considerate.
This was the big sleeper hit of the summer? This stereotype-ridden, mean-spirited extended sitcom?
Napoleon Dynamite has quirky characters, but you know they only have weird characteristics because someone thought it would be funny to have a character who did such-and-such. The characters are all typed. Hey, here’s the guy who’s in love with a woman he met over the Internet. What do you know, she’s black! And taller than he is! (I was waiting to find out she was really a he, since that would totally fit the “Internet dating” stereotypes, but that would have spoiled the movie’s feel-good ending.) Hey, here’s the obnoxious uncle with his get-rich-quick schemes. What do you know, he’s selling breast-enhancement herbal supplements! And he’s going to try to sell some to the girl Napoleon likes!
I thought Napoleon Dynamite was going to be a story about a teenage boy who doesn’t fit in, who goes his own way, and who learns how to deal with the world around him despite its rejection of him. Standard indy-movie fare, from Harold and Maude to Igby Goes Down (both of which are much, much better films). The first shot in the movie, after those cutesy-poo credits, is a long shot of Napoleon facing the camera, waiting for the bus, and I expected him to look up and start speaking into the camera, a la Ferris Bueller. That would have been bad enough, but then we might have gained some insight into the character’s motivations, into what makes him do what he does.
Instead, Napoleon is a parody of the weirdest kid from your high school. The movie gives us no reason to like him. We know he likes to draw pictures in his notebook, that he wants to find a date to the dance, and so on, but we have no idea why. At the end of the movie, he tells his friend, “Just follow your heart. That’s what I always do,” which is supposed to explain his personality, but it’s too little too late. He is weird because the movie is funnier if he’s weird. I could not sympathize or empathize with him at all.
The only character I liked at all was Napoleon’s friend/maybe-girlfriend Deb, who is trying to pay for college by selling keychains and homemade Glamour Shots. Maybe it was better acting, maybe it was better writing, but her character seemed to have more than two dimensions.
I realized about halfway through Napoleon Dynamite that I have been watching good coming-of-age movies all year, movies about teenagers struggling to grow up and get through adolescence and figure out what the hell is going on in the universe. Gregory’s Girl was probably the least and slightest of these movies, but its characters do seem real. We can sympathize with them. We know how they feel. They remind us of our own awkward moments and crazy dreams in high school. Bill Forsyth (director of Gregory’s Girl, Housekeeping, and Local Hero) is well known for movies populated by quirky characters, but their quirks seem natural, springing from their characters, not imposed to get a cheap laugh.
Compare this movie to the one I saw last week, Dear Pillow, in which the teenaged main character was so realistic that it was difficult to watch at times. I simultaneously felt sorry for him and wanted to give him a good smack. That movie was made on a shoestring budget and the visuals were not so great but it was believable and honest and absorbing.
Hell, compare this movie to Alice Adams, the 1935 movie with Katharine Hepburn as the young woman who wants to be like the other girls, who tries so hard to hide her family’s poverty from her boyfriend and everyone else, and who has to deal with a thousand tiny embarrassments and awkward moments.
I don’t know if we are supposed to laugh at Napoleon or feel sorry for him or empathize with him or what. I got bored with him. The big scene at the end, where he puts himself out on the line for his friend, had most of the audience in stitches, but I didn’t feel anything. I wondered whether it would be more apt to say the scene had been ripped off Harold Lloyd’s movie The Freshman, or off the end of About a Boy. Probably both. But in The Freshman, we like Lloyd’s awkward weird student, and we want him to succeed. Who cares what happens to Napoleon?
That was part of the problem. This movie kept evoking other, funnier movies. Rushmore. Election. The other movies I’ve mentioned in this review. I kept wishing we’d seen one of those movies instead.
Mostly I am puzzled. Why was this movie such a success? Can anyone enlighten me?
Napoleon Dynamite may be the least entertaining movie I have seen this year. But hey, at least I got a good rant to write afterwards.