If Napoleon Dynamite wasn’t such a commercial hit, I would probably leave it alone. The debut feature of director/writer Jared Hess, it shows wit, invention, and good taste in indie films: it’s desperately obvious that Hess conceived his film in the model of Wes Anderson’s wonderful Bottle Rocket and Rushmore. That Napoleon Dynamite is nowhere near as good is the simple result of Hess’s failing to understand why Anderson’s films work the magic they do. Or, possibly, he’s too much of a jerk to understand – but even that, if true, would hardly be a big deal. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and failed imitation is the sincerest proof that the flattery was well-deserved. What bothers me, then, is my fear that Dynamite is a hit precisely _because_ Hess didn’t understand (or even decide) what he was doing.

Since I can think of no good reason to see Napoleon Dynamite until you’ve seen Bottle Rocket and Rushmore first, I'll discuss Wes Anderson’s films here. Their most obvious feature – the one Hess gloms onto – is the overwhelming quirkiness of their characters, all of whom are outsiders. A 20-year-old man checks into a mental home voluntarily, and when he chooses to leave, his brother insists on helping him break out (even though the only needed “breakout” routine involves signing out at the front desk). The brother has designed a detailed 75-year-plan to make them robbers and crime bosses, just because it always seemed cool, and because the owner of the local lawn-care service might be impressed. A 14-year-old founds dozens of school clubs, writes plays, fakes severe injury, and competes for the romantic love of a kintergarden teacher; his competitor, a rich and droopy ex-tycoon in his forties, treats the boy as an equal, to the point where they smash each other’s bikes.

On the other hand, a more adult romance proceeds in no way harmed by the fact that neither the man nor the woman speaks a word of the other’s language. A family of Royal Tenenbaums goes a whole film without anyone changing clothes; a tennis star stages a mental breakdown; a neighbor stages a wedding in tribal war-paint; a television star named Steve Zissou declares war on a tiger-shark. “Neato”, we hear Jared Hess thinking, “I can make an entire movie out of freaks”.

Which he proceeds to do, with undoubted skill. Napoleon Dynamite himself – named, for no reason, after an old pseudonym of the already-pseudonymous Elvis Costello – is a gangly white teen with a huge red-haired Afro, a surly and defensive voice, an obsession with his Dungeons & Dragons-style artwork, and a tendency to stuff Tater Tots in his pocket to eat later. His older brother Kip Dynamite, still living at home, looks exactly like a younger version of the mumbly guy in Office Space who’s never noticed that he’s been fired; Kip stages a courtship with, get this, some gal he knows from the Internet. His Uncle Rico, a door-to-door salesman, obsesses over Get Rich Quick schemes; tells Napoleon’s crush objects that Nap is a bedwetter; and believes his own life peaked during his year as a backup high school quarterback – or would have, if his coach had called him off the bench at the right moment. Meanwhile, Grandma tends the family indifferently but finds a chance to break her coccyx: ha! They said “cock”!

Napoleon befriends Pedro, the lone Hispanic in their part of Idaho, with a bleak uncomprehending stare and a quiet devotion to the Future Farmers of America. He also befriends Deb, a gifted (but weird) photographer with a shy stammer, who meets him when doing her own door-to-door sales of pathetic trinkets that Napoleon “already made buttloads of at camp”. The school has this Happy Hands Club that does strange dancelike routines built entirely from arm/hand gestures; the students all dress, for no reason, as if 2004 is still a couple decades away; and at lunch, the school serves cafeteria food, which is freaky enough in real life that Jared Hess needs to write no embellishments.

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What he missed, in Anderson’s films, is their idealism, their purity. For one thing, no one within the stories notices, let alone comments on, the oddness of anyone’s behavior – at least until it becomes destructive, and not always then. When Dignan in Bottle Rocket wants to help Anthony escape the asylum, Anthony gets a doctor to help him fashion a rope-ladder and let him leave by the window: it’s what Dignan wants and needs. Several other people help stage a big robbery, because it would (again) be rude not to, and wear tape on their nose because, well, why refuse?

Max gets listed in Rushmore’s yearbook as president of 18 separate clubs, without special praise or rancor. Mr. Blume earns and spends millions of dollars without the ability to look up from his shoes un-panicked, and no one finds this puzzling. Or, probably, dozens of people do, but _they don’t count_; the story is in the shared mythology, the people kind enough to treat everyone’s worldview as equally important.

The result, then, is an exceptional sweetness. Wes Anderson’s films have dark sides, of course: as small as a son lying about his father’s profession, as large as an innocent person killed in the service of a delusion, as encompassing as a family driven mad with collective neuroses. But even when the harsh moments are funny, or driven by stupid impulses, we don't laugh _at_ anyone. All the cues (from dialogue to scenery to incidental visual tricks) are asking us to see the world as the characters see it, and to love, desire, and/or chafe at the same people they do.

Napoleon Dynamite has, to be sure, many of these moments. Napoleon is socially inept, but like an M.I.T. student is socially inept. Just like my friend Jen was told while going there “you have bovine eyes” – as flattery, because cows have big, round, gentle eyes – so Napoleon means well when he greets Deb with “Do you drink 1% milk because you think you’re fat? Because, um, you’re really not. You could drink whole milk”. We see Deb consider and accept the compliment, which is just right: we believe Wes Anderson films because they ought to be real, not because reality lives up to them.

We also see the conversation stall at once, because that’s right too: courtship among the almost-friendless is terrifying. Napoleon is surly and curt (we first see him answering a polite “What are you gonna do today?” with a snarled “Whatever I feel like!”) because it’s safest to do the rejecting first; when he can’t bring himself to be mean to Deb, he has no backup plan.

Similarly right, to me, is the connection between Napoleon and Pedro, which starts, as so many friendships aming losers do, by default: because neither is unkind to the other, and they’re in the same place a lot. Napoleon, who knows from films what a friendship is supposed to be like, formalizes it: “So I guess we’re friends now, huh?”. Pedro thinks a moment and says “Sure”. Napoleon probes: “That means you’ve got my back, right?”. Pedro says “Huh?” Napoleon says “Never mind”. But Pedro does help him in the pursuit of girls, earnestly explaining “You’ve got to have skills. Do you have any skills?” Napoleon, after thinking for uncomfortably long, says “I can draw, scimitars and broadswords and such… I probably draw them better than anyone I know”. And when that doesn’t work after all, Pedro shares his date to the school dance with Napoleon for a few songs, because that’s what friends do.

I even like the nebulousness of the plot. The two main sources of momentum are slow and random, sure. We don’t know the reasons why Pedro runs for student council president, but hey: they can’t be more trivial than the reason _I_ ran (I figured someone should have campaign posters that were funny), and they might be as fundamental and secret as a hopeless desire to be known. We also don’t know why Kip’s Internet girlfriend LaFawnduh has taken an interest in him, and I wish we did, but I enjoy their meeting enough to not worry it much. Most lives _are_ kinda undirected, especially in high school.

The actors help a lot. John Heder, as Napoleon, pauses before every move and talks with his eyes closed; he radiates the helpless fear of screwing up yet again, even as his words are often bragging or snippy. He also learns to move, using a dance-instruction video, with a bizarre and angular grace. Efrem Ramirez, as Pedro, is quiet and withdrawn and slow, but uses that to show moments of serene self-confidence with the smallest of gestures and a new twinkle in his eyes. Tina Majorino should be too pretty for the role of Deb – it bugs me that even movies which cast unattractive guys will insist on good-looking girls – but she shrinks into herself, and recites Deb’s least sincere lines with an embarrassment that no popular girl would need to show. And even Jon Gries, convincingly reptilian in the role of Uncle Rico, manages to put some dignified pride into his speeches about his door-to-door business.

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But on the other hand…

There is the fact that, for every characterization that works, there’s another that’s pushed obnoxiously far. There’s the tater tots in Napoleon’s pocket, which of course get squashed for a moment of gross-out humor; there’s the way he has to take the phone entirely outside the house before talking on it, as if his parents were vampires with super hearing powers. There’s the refusal to let Napoleon have _any_ talents: when he draws a picture of a pretty classmate in order to impress her, the result is awful, and then he tells her “I spent three hours just on the shading of the upper lip. It’s probably the best drawing I’ve ever made”.

There’s Pedro’s pre-election jitters, which make him physically feverish, at which point he shaves his head to cool down, then buries himself in an oversized hood out of shame. There’s the perky, one-dimensional shallowness of the popular kids, which is irritating to watch on its own (Max, in Rushmore, sensibly puts the popular kids out of his awareness completely), and made much worse by the fact that Pedro and Napoleon are supposed to seek their approval.

There’s Kip’s irksome need to keep mentioning his online “girlfriend”, and the cliche extremes of his appearance and (high, nervous) voice. There’s the oversell of Rico’s back-story: I’ve met plenty of ex-jock blowhards in my life, but they at least freakin’ played in some of the team’s games, and they don’t claim they “used to be able to throw the ball half-a-mile”. And since Rico is otherwise portrayed as a talented-enough salesman and bullshiitter with a basic sense of cunning, I don’t believe his Internet purchase of a “time machine” for a second.

“Lighten up”, you say, “it’s a comedy”. Fine, but in that case, why hire talented dramatic actors and open their characters to empathy? Clearly we’re supposed to giggle at Napoleon in his Happy Hands Club scene, where his already-ridiculous arm movements are three seconds behind everyone else’s. But since he’s always a little slow, we should probably laugh at him again when he’s stuck at a miserable dance, abandoned by his date before he even got to speak to her. Pedro’s slow too; let’s laugh at his spic accent.

That at least would be consistent, but then why do Napoleon and Pedro get the most forced, ill-prepared happy ending I’ve seen in years – one that’s clearly meant to be heart-warming? Although, then again, why should our hearts be warmed when – for all that Napoleon has needs and wants and hurts and fears – he’s also kind of a selfish jerk who refuses to take a proper lead in his own movie?

Is Napoleon Dynamite racist, because we’re supposed to snigger at black names like “LaFawndah” and “DJ Kwon”, and laugh when LaFawnduh gives Kip a street-homie makeover? Or is it anti-racist, by treating blacks and whites as equally stupid, and by letting Shondrella Avery play LaFawnduh with a radiant mix of glamour and kindness, and by letting Kip look, actually, a little less ridiculous as a homie than he did before? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows.

If you’re asking an audience to spend two hours with self-involved, unattractive losers, it helps a lot to give them a reason. Many outstanding reasons are available, don’t get me wrong: Rushmore is unlike Welcome to the Dollhouse is unlike Revenge of the Nerds is unlike Freddy vs. Jason. Jared Hess didn’t decide.

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I don’t want to be extreme here. I enjoy the Airplane!/ Naked Gun/ Hot Shots! sequence of movies, where absolutely everyone is a blithering incompetent. But we see no feelings hurt, because any resemblance between the characters and any persons, living or dead, is pretty fuucking unlikely. (Also, just as in Wes Anderson’s films, nobody in these movies treats anyone else as stupid.) I think the TV comedies the Simpsons and the Family Guy are marvelous, and both shows feature lunatic self-destructiveness and cruelty right next to attempts to be moving and poignant; but they keep the two separate, so that the potentially meanest moments are exactly the ones too silly to believe.

Even in “reality shows”, I used to watch stuff like Candid Camera and TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes, and perhaps I’d even enjoy their cruder successor Tom Green. But the victims on these shows were set up; we can laugh at their predicament and still know that we would’ve looked just as dumb in their place. And hey, I don’t want to encourage anyone to watch Joe Millionaire or the Apprentice; but if you must, the real people in these shows made the choice to be public idiots, so I doubt there’s harm in giving them what they want.

Napoleon Dynamite doesn’t have these excuses. It makes sure its characters _are_ (mostly) believable; it invites us to see their pain. Then it asks us to be Nelson Muntz, pointing as we shriek “HAA, haa!”.

This seems to be a very popular request.

Jared Hess had, for the full length of his story, unlimited power. He could invent any persons or creatures he wanted to, in any world, using any toys and pursuing any goal by any means. What did he invent? Caricatures of the kids who, in high school, he mocked to make himself feel better. He’s a good enough filmmaker, with talented enough actors, that the result is almost compelling; and the muscles I used to cringe are, more than not, the same muscles I would have used to laugh. But that only makes the waste greater.

Recommended: No