Viking Night: Napoleon Dynamite
By Bruce Hall
January 31, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
That's almost as bad as not recycling, or eating red meat.
So all these years after its release, a really bad movie continues to languish in some pop culture quarters, like an untreated rash, or a really old pet that's too sick to live but still refuses to die. Fox even attempted to resurrect the short lived phenomenon with an ill-fated animated series that will probably have been cancelled by the time you read this. Napoleon Dynamite survives for the same reason Ayn Rand still gets read. Because it's considered trendy by certain people, even if none of them can tell you why.
I know I sure can't, but I'm going to spend the next thousand words or so trying to figure it out.
Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) has a ridiculous name to go with his ridiculous game. He's a laconic high school student who would, in short, be quite at home with the Dungeons and Dragons/World of Warcraft/Magic the Gathering crowd. That is, if he were imaginative enough to be good at D&D, had enough money for a computer and wasn't too lazy to play a card game designed for ten-year-olds. Rather than study, make friends or learn how to do...anything...Napoleon is content to daydream, draw pictures of unicorns, and declare himself a de facto expert on pretty much everything in the universe.
He's tall, lanky, awkward and uncoordinated. He wears Teri Garr's old glasses. He dresses like he has a head injury, he never closes his mouth, and he has art Garfunkel hair. He brags like Chad Ochocinco but sounds like Steven Wright when he does it. When he gets irritated his breath comes out in a labored sighs that sounds a lot like a death rattle. He has a girlfriend who is a super hot model but you can't meet her because she lives out of state and doesn't have a phone so there's no way to contact her. So, naturally, nobody likes him.
This includes his peculiar, somewhat gender neutral grandmother (Sandy Martin). Napoleon lives with her and his significantly older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). And when I say "significantly older," I mean "old enough that he should have gotten a job and moved out of the house ten years ago" older. He has an Internet girlfriend and dreams of being a cage fighter, despite being built like a half cooked fettuccine noodle. They all live in an aging split level home in Preston, Idaho, where an aging split level home decorated with plastic plants, shag carpet, wobbly fixtures and Glamour Shots everywhere is apparently considered high living.
Napoleon might have been doomed to spend the rest of his high school career alone with these people, mistaking his isolation for individuality and his lack of talent for artistic integrity. But he secretly has a crush on the only person in school as hopelessly awkward as he is, a girl named Deb (Tina Majorino) who looks like Frances McDormand's niece, is a comically inept freelance photographer, sells hideous homemade costume jewelry door to door and gets her hair done by a toddler. She's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but at least she's ambitious. And Napoleon is too chicken to make a move.
Enter Pedro (Efren Ramirez), an Hispanic exchange student every bit as listless yet perhaps 30% more intelligent than anyone else in the school. He strikes up an unenthusiastic friendship with Napoleon more or less entirely by chance, and immediately sets his sights on Deb. Pedro doesn't say a lot, but he seems to know exactly what he wants. His arrival shakes things up a bit, inspiring Napoleon to make his own attempt at romance, which is something that takes the words "gawky" and "depressing" to a whole new level.
Eventually, Grandma breaks her tailbone riding a dune buggy, for some reason. This requires Napoleon's Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) to move in and care for him and Kip while she recuperates. Rico is a little like Al Bundy if he'd decided to live out of a conversion van instead of getting married, and sell Tupperware instead of shoes. He's well into his 40s, and blames his lifetime of total failure on the fact that his high school football career never panned out. He spends his free time eating microwave flank steak and making videos of himself throwing the football. He's is an inspiration to every lanky, unambitious, rural kid who grew up without parents or goals.
But like the others, Rico's incompetence is still somehow intimidating to Napoleon, who finds himself surrounded by people whose lives seem to be full of activity, despite their overall uselessness to the rest of humanity. It compels Napoleon to fill his life with a bunch of pointless exertion, but with no apparent goals or overall relevance to say, the plot of the movie. What makes it worse is that losers usually have the benefit of other losers to commiserate with, to drink cheap beer with, and to shake their fist at the fickle fates with. All these people seem to have is each other, which is about all four starving men on a lifeboat can say.
In addition to being light on plot, Napoleon Dynamite has the same relentlessly smug attitude toward rural America that you find in films like Raising Arizona or Talladega Nights, but without the humor and/or charm. Stereotyping isn't fair but it happens for a reason, and it should be a lazy easy place to find a laugh. So the bigger question, when you see it in this movie, would be "why should I laugh?". Napoleon Dynamite relies on a strange sort of reverse-ironic humor that's supposed to be funny because of the delivery, not the context.
Rico is a middle aged man who lives in the past, and that's funny just...because. It isn't a consistent driver for the character's development. It's just a poorly executed, intermittent gag. Napoleon is a dork, so he says dorky things, which is funny because...he's a dork. Get it? Deb is a wilting violet with low self esteem so she mumbles and runs off screen at inappropriate times. Pedro is reserved and quiet so everything he says is muted and under his breath. And, he's Mexican so....get it? No really, do you get it?
Because I don't.
None of these factors seem to serve as consistent impulses for character development over the course of the movie. There's no hook to grab onto, there's no central theme to exploit. These people are just supposed to be funny because they're "stupid," which is inherently "funny," so it doesn't really matter what they "say" or "do" for 90 minutes, or whether or not these actions form any kind of coherent narrative. You might as well replace all the character names with "Poopy McPoophead" or "Seymour Butts," because this seems to be the level of comedic sensibility we're dealing with here.
Hell, the movie doesn't even have a proper protagonist or villain. Every nerd film needs a villain. Either an anti-nerd (Better off Dead) or an über nerd (Real Genius) must be present in any dork-centric film. But here, Napoleon's primary nemesis is a generic looking Aryan boy who is actually more boring than the hero. And as a hero, Napoleon is memorable only by virtue of being freakishly disturbing, and whether or not he's actually the Prime Mover in the story is debatable. But most important, there's so little to genuinely like about this flick or any of its characters. It's really hard to enjoy a film that is filled with such obvious contempt for itself.
A movie like Raising Arizona at least had the love of a child at the center of it. A television show like "King of the Hill" was consistently grounded in a solid family dynamic. Napoleon Dynamite seems content to have us point and laugh at the stupid rednecks, and that's about it. And while the movie is famously full of memorable quotes, as I mentioned, they need no context to be funny because the humor is all in the delivery. And once delivered, the thrill is gone. Napoleon Dynamite is a 90 minute documentary about boring people doing boring things for no reason other than because there's a camera around, and you are expected to laugh while you watch it just because the people who created it laughed while they made it.
If you liked Napoleon Dynamite for the six months it was really popular back in 2004, I'd say that makes you pretty normal. Sometimes a phenomenon sneaks up on us so fast that we instinctively engage, lest we be left out. Hey, some guy in the office just said "Vote for Pedro" and everyone laughed! I am now laughing too, even though I have no idea why that is funny! What a fantastic age we live in! And now I'll go to the water cooler and say something glib about Abu Ghraib or that tsunami, because...well... it seems as though that's the thing to do if you want to look like you're really cool and well informed.
But all these years later if the shine still hasn't worn off, I'm not sure what to say. Maybe you're a boring person with a boring life who still thinks you're cool because in our heads, we're all the hero of our own story. Maybe you live in a community that exists only because for some of us, having kids is a convenient way to achieve something without having any actual skills or talent. Maybe your idea of "steak" is that pile of desiccated shoe leather next to the popcorn shrimp at Golden Corral. Maybe your life is set to a soundtrack of 1980s B-sides despite the fact you hit puberty while George W. Bush was President.
Or, maybe you are just too easily amused. That's not a crime, but if so I'd suggest you check out Nacho Libre instead. It's written and directed by the same guy only it's surprisingly funny, unexpectedly touching and best of all, it has an actual plot. Or, just get out of the house and get some sun. Catch some mad air on your sweet bike. Unwind with some Rex Kwon Do. Draw a picture of a Liger. Or, if you dare, watch the first half of Napoleon Dynamite so you'll know what the hell I'm even talking about. But don't say I didn't warn you. That's Napoleon Dynamite sitting over there. Nobody likes him, but he's cooler than tofu, bottled water and recycling put together. So, we let him hang around anyway.
What a fantastic age we live in.