Napoleon Dynamite - 2004

"Napoleon Dynamite" - 2004

Dir. by Jared Hess - 1 hr. 36 min.

 

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield 

It's a strange experience to watch a film like this, out of it's time. Particularly with comedies, when they blow up they blow UP and are inescapable, and then no one wants to ever talk about them again (much less deal with references to it). It becomes very hard to seperate the art from everything swirling around it. In the 10 year span surrounding "Napoleon Dynamite," it happened with several movies ("There's Something About Mary," "Austin Powers," and "Borat," just to name a few), and I largely have no desire to watch any of those ones at all, no matter how much or how hard I laughed when I saw them originally. I saw this in the guide on TV, and thought "what the heck, eat your ham, Tina!"

 

Have you really not seen this movie? I guess it's possible, so to recap... Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is a spectacularly awkward teenager in a world where everyone is spectacularly, and differently awkward. This world is called Idaho. He lives with his grandmother and his cage-fighter brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell). Seriously, does the plot even matter? Everyone is a complete weirdo. Napoleon's only friend, figuratively-narcoleptic Pedro (Efren Ramirez) runs for class president, which ends with a Jamiroquai jam. People find where they belong. That's as much of a plot as really matters.

I guess the biggest question here is whether this movie is still funny or not. You can't really even say whether it justified all of the attention it got, that sort of aspect is really out of everyone's hands at some point. The good news is that, at least for me, I still enjoyed it. It helps a lot that literally none of the actors play their characters ironically, winking at the camera (except for LaFawnduh, who literally winks at the camera, but not in that way). Self-consciously weird rarely ages well. It just comes off as a entire town of people who are just doing their best, although they also know that that's not quite enough, and in the case of Napoleon, creates constant frustration and outbursts. I feel like the movie would have been destroyed by incorporating even one character who had their act together. And having seen other Jared Hess movies, that tone of outright weirdness is a constant, and is absolutely not an accident.

In this instance, time has benefitted "Napoleon Dynamite." Being able to get away from the endless merchandising, the constant quoting, and general omnipresence of this film allows it to just be the weird-ass, shaggy movie that it is at it's heart. It's worth noting that it's part of a minor trend in movies in that same 10 year span, where the tone is set for the bulk of the movie, and then there's a surprisingly deft performance that is built up to (think Jack Black in "High Fidelity" or Samuel L. Jackson's gig in "Black Snake Moan"), and that's a stucture that works, if you can pull it off. Thanks to D-Qwon's Dance Grooves, Napoleon did just that. I could see throwing this on again down the road, although it might not be my first choice, but that's pretty good for something that was as everywhere as this was at one point. 

3/5 - TV