Napoleon Dynamite (20th Century-Fox, Fox Searchlight, Paramount, MTV, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched the 2004 film Napoleon Dynamite, a minor-budgeted indie (at $400,000) produced, co-written and directed by Jared Hess and co-released by 20^th Century-Fox and Paramount (though Paramount was invited apparently mainly because they’re part of the Viacom conglomerate along with MTV, and the Foxes wanted MTV’s expertise on how to market something to young people). The film became a smash hit and inspired a cartoon series on TV in 2012 (which bombed even though Hess was in charge of it and all but one of the original actors repeated their characters as voice actors in the TV show), and also invited a perpetual controversy involving Elvis Costello. It was E.C., t/n Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus, who coined the name “Napoleon Dynamite” — he was quarrelling with his record labels, F-Beat in the U.K. and Columbia in the U.S., so in 1982 he released a single on A&M Records and invented “Napoleon Dynamite” as a pseudonym (though the song, “Pills and Soap,” later appeared on a Columbia album, with Elvis Costello billed as performer and Declan MacManus as songwriter — much the way Chicago bluesmen Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf took their songwriting credits under their real names, McKinley Morganfield and Chester Alan Arthur Burnett, respectively). In 1986 he released his last Columbia album, Blood and Chocolate, using the “Napoleon Dynamite” pseudonym (though he “outed” himself in a disclaimer, printed upside down, that read, “‘Napoleon Dynamite’ is Elvis Costello”), and not surprisingly he was unhappy when 18 years later a movie came out using that name for the character of an unrepentantly nerdy teen who manages to give the bullies (of both genders) who are making him look ridiculous their well-deserved comeuppance.

I searched the Web for “elvis costello napoleon dynamite” and got two clashing links, one an interview with Costello from 2008 claiming credit for the moniker (http://www.contactmusic.com/elvis-costello/news/costello-adamant-napoleon-dynamite-was-his-idea_1088228), and one from Hess in 2012 (on the eve of the release of the TV series) at http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/napoleon-dynamite-creator-didn-steal-elvis-costello-article-1.1003284, in which Hess said he first heard the name Napoleon Dynamite “from a man in Cicero, Ill., when Hess was working as a Mormon missionary,” and he was willing to admit that the mysterious man from Cicero might first have heard it from Elvis Costello, but Hess himself hadn’t. (If you click on that link you’ll also see a picture of Jared Hess that makes him look like a much older version of the protagonist from his movie.) I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from Napoleon Dynamite the movie, and when we’re introduced to the central character, played by Jon Heder as a paradigmatic high-school loser with tousled (and indeterminately colored) hair, glasses and baggy jeans, desperately (and unsuccessfully) trying to impress his schoolmates on the school bus with an unbelievable tale of how he spent his summer vacation hunting wolverines and bagging 50 of them with a 12-gauge shotgun, my immediate reaction was, “Oh, no, not another movie about an alienated high-school student.” But Hess (and his writing partner Jerusha Hess, whom I presume is his wife even though that’s the only reason I have to believe that the name “Jerusha” is feminine) managed to run roughshod over the old clichés and produce something truly funny, moving and entertaining. Napoleon himself lives with his grandmother — what happened to his parents is carefully left unstated — in the town of Preston in rural Idaho. He shares his house with his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who if anything is even nerdier than Napoleon and is also under the spell of their uncle Rico (Jon Gries). Rico is selling cheap knock-offs of Tupperware door-to-door and enlisting Kip to help him.

Exactly when this movie takes place is something of a mystery; it’s certainly after 1982 (since there’s a gag of a phony “time machine” Rico wants to use to go back to that date, when he is sure he could have won the big game for his high-school football team if his coach had put him in in the fourth quarter) and the musical selections are mostly from the 1980’s (including two great songs, “The Rose” — though the version we hear is a sound-alike by someone named Darci Monet since Bette Midler refused to license her record to the film — and “Time After Time,” genuinely sung by Cyndi Lauper, who hadn’t let the producers of the early-1980’s exploitation film Girls Just Want to Have Fun use her record but presumably thought Napoleon Dynamite was a quality production and therefore deserved her voice). We see phones with very long extension cords, and the high-school kids listen to music on cassettes instead of CD’s, but the Internet exists already as a marketable product and Kip spends hours on it (presumably on a dial-up connection), albeit on a very retro-looking computer with a giant cathode-ray monitor instead of a flat-screen. Besides being tormented and pushed around, literally and figuratively, by the usual assortment of bullies (who are, not surprisingly, sexier by far than Jon Heder, though I thought the nicest-looking guy in the film was a poor schnook in maroon shirt and shorts who’s spared from being beaten, and his bike stolen, by the two biggest bullies when … more on that later), naturally Our Napoleon is also painfully shy around girls. He somehow manages to get Trisha (Emily Kennard) to go as his date to the school dance, though he doesn’t have a ride to take her there — Uncle Rico offers to do it but gets wrapped up in a sales call (actually, we suspect, wrapped up in a booty call with the woman he’s met while trying to sell her plastic food containers), and Napoleon tears through the Idaho countryside before he’s picked up by two cholos in a low-rider Chevrolet convertible. They’re friends of one of the few classmates who’ve actually befriended Napoleon, Mexican immigrant student Pedro Sanchez (Efren Ramirez), whom Napoleon was drawn to because he has a cool Sledgehammer bicycle.

It’s the cholos who drive past the school at an opportune moment to save the maroon-clad cutie from being beaten and his bike stolen by the bullies, and when Pedro decides to run for student body president against the ultra-popular Summer Wheatly (Haylie Duff, who’s been in a few Lifetime movies since — she’s the protagonist of the film His Secret Family, though in my blog post on it I mistakenly gave the actress’s first name as Hillary!) one of his few advantages was that he promises that if he wins the cholos will regularly drive past the school as an anti-bullying patrol. There’s also an intriguing subplot in which Kip meets a woman online — she describes herself as having blonde hair and being named LaFawnduh (or at least that’s as close as Kip comes to writing down her real name), though when she arrives in Preston for a face-to-face meeting she turns out to be Black. She’s got blonde hair, all right, but it’s the sort of dye job we’ve seen from several Black singers — indeed the actress playing her, Shondrella Avery, comes off like she was auditioning for the Tina Turner biopic and took a wrong turn somewhere. But whereas in another type of film Kip’s dream girl turning out to be African-American would be a major plot issue, here it’s no big deal. Throughout the film Hess has an unerring instinct not only for the atavistic props and settings but also for the telling detail that will set his project apart from every other film made about a miserable, dorky, nerdy, alienated boy in high school. Part of his success is he’s set it in the country; Napoleon is a member of Future Farmers of America (even though we see him on his family’s land, what there is of it, and can’t help but conclude that the last thing on earth he wants to be is a farmer, especially when he tries to get rid of an inedible casserole by feeding it to the family’s pet llama — yes, you read that right) and correctly identifies the flaw in two of the three containers of milk put before him to judge (one contains bleach and the other was given by a cow who was eating onions) — we don’t get to see him drink out of the third container but we do get to see Pedro tell one of the farmers in charge (two men who look like two of the Three Stooges retired to a farm) say that a particular cow has five udders when the correct number for a cow that gives the best milk is four. There are plenty of other plot elements, including a scam martial-arts instructor (Diederich Bader) and a bizarre twist in which Pedro is forced by the school administrators to take all the posters for his presidential campaign down after he organizes a group of classmates to take swings at a piñata made to look like his opponent, Summer Wheatly.

Fortunately, in addition to his accomplishments as a milk taste-test judge for the Future Farmers of America, Napoleon has also learned to do Black dance, courtesy of a videotape he picked up in a thrift store (another element of the film that dates it: all the home videos included are VHS) hosted by someone named D-Quon. Pedro is about to throw the election for student body president when Napoleon encourages him to stay in the race, speak at the last rally before the vote, and when they find out that the candidates are supposed to do a skit after their speech, Napoleon shows off his dance moves in Pedro’s place and Pedro wins. (According to imdb.com, Jon Heder’s dance routine was the last scene shot for the film, and they only had 10 minutes’ worth of film left; they ran out before Heder finished his routine and had to cut together bits and pieces from what they had to look like he was doing a continuous and fantastic dance. Frankly, I think Heder and whoever choreographed him ripped off a lot of the moves from Michael Jackson, though that seems right as a model an aspiring white dancer would pick during the time when this film takes place — whenever that is.) After the credits — which told us, among other things, that the quite lovely song at the end of the film, “The Promise,” which Charles had thought was from the 1980’s British synth band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark but turned out to be by a previously unknown (to us) band called When In Rome — a final sequence appears showing the wedding of Kip and LaFawnduh, to which Napoleon arrives late because he came in on a horse (I’m not making this up, you know!) which he gives to the couple as a honeymoon present. Charles said he thought Napoleon Dynamite worked as well as it did because Jared Hess pushed the character’s nerdiness far beyond not only real life but other movies as well — and certainly at least one imdb.com reviewer had the same reaction to it I did, which was that you had to give the film a chance and keep watching it until you realized that this isn’t just another high-school alienation movie but something genuinely quirky and special. Even the opening credits — which feature the members of the cast and crew with their names emblazoned on various middle-American foodstuffs and other objects that figure in the action (needless to say, the writing credits for Jared and Jerusha Hess are emblazoned on school pencils!) — are there to ease you into this film’s quirky (a word that keeps coming to mind again and again about it) world and give you a heads-up that you’re going to be seeing something very special.