Napoleon Dynamite - Like, the Best Special Edition Ever!

Rating PG Formats DVD Genre comedy Starring Jon Heder, Jon Gries, Haylie Duff, Ellen Dubin, Emily Kennard Directed by Jared Hess Publisher Fox Searchlight Pictures External Links Official Napolean Dynamite Website Official Fox Searchlight Pictures Website

Every generation has them. In the 60's, it was King of Hearts and Harold and Maude. In the 70's, you had Phantom of the Paradise and Badlands and in the 80's it was Rocky Horror Picture Show and just about anything starring an angry androgen wearing glitter. Cult movies have been around forever and nearly all of them have two things in common: They feature outsiders, and they're embraced by everyone who feels like one.

Oh yeah, there's a third thing: They're critic-proof. As well they should be. You can't call yourself an outsider if your favorite things are lauded by the mainstream.

The past few years have seen an influx of movies desperate to claim cult status. Some of them missed the mark by being embraced by the critical establishment. The best of the bunch, Thumbsucker, failed at the box office because the marketing gurus thought that citing great reviews from intellectual journals would draw the cult crowd. That group stayed away in droves. They were all rushing to Napoleon Dynamite.

Based loosely by Jared Harris on his short film, Peluca, Napoleon Dynamite is a cult movie to its marrow. Napoleon (Jon Heder) is one of those high school kids who will always occupy the center seat at the losers table in the cafeteria. And there is little wonder why. His affect is...well, he hasn't got one. He lurches through the world with all the grace of a wet washcloth jolted forward by a cattle prod and his idea of a pickup line is "Are you drinking 1% milk because you think you're fat?" Who would want to spend ninety minutes with this guy?

So why did millions of viewers choose to make this the cult movie of the present day?

I have a theory.

Napoleon Dynamite is different from earlier cult films in one important way. In all those films, the nerd was presented as an anti-hero. We knew the protagonist was socially challenged but we also knew that the movie was going to be about triumph, not failure. In the seemingly most obvious parallel, 1984's The Revenge of the Nerds, the fun was in seeing how the lowliest kids would ultimately use their very nerdishness to win the day, steal the good looking girls, and claim the title of Lords of the Campus. We went to these movies because we wanted to live vicariously through the triumph of characters we secretly saw as reflections of ourselves.

Ever since Forrest Gump (which Napoleon Dynamite cleverly, but subtly references in the first five minutes), we have been inundated by painfully manipulated stories about "hope" and "triumph." How many more little guys do we really want to see win out in the end? How many more developmentally disabled kids have to be given a chance in the big game? Even a cursory glance at box office statistics will tell you that these movies are clearing theaters faster than a stink bomb. Raise your hands, everyone who saw last year's big summer film, Cinderella Man. See what I mean? That movie not only failed once at the box office, it failed twice.

Napoleon Dynamite is like an anti-Cinderella Man. There's really nothing much to like about this Napoleon. Yes, he's a loser. Yes, he wants the pretty cheerleader. Yes, he gets punched out by all the wildly overaged jocks in the school. But you know what? He's a creep. He responds to situations with either a blank stare or a sudden burst of uncontrollable rage (what would this movie have been if Hess decided to examine that anger? Silence of the Nerds?) For good or bad, Hess and Heder are so intent on having us laugh at Napoleon that they never bother to give us any reasons to like him. To hell with seeing ourselves in this underdog. With the exception of a completely unearned happy ending, Napoleon Dynamite is all about our feeling superior to the main character and his friends. Our enjoyment is drawn from the fact that deep down we occasionally need to see something other than triumph and hope. Just as surely as every one of us felt like the underdog in high school, we also secretly admired the bullies who won all the medals and got the prettiest girls. And we hated the nerds who got beaten up. After all, if we felt like underdogs what could be worse than confronting a real one and thinking we must be like that schmuck?

Napoleon Dynamite does manage to have its cake and eat, too. It never asks us to like the mean kids, just stand back and enjoy their dismantling of Napoleon. In the end, the bullies neither win nor lose. One can only presume that after a momentary pause they will go back to beating up on Napoleon and he will continue to rationalize his piddling response with fantastic lies only he can believe.

I think that's called a sequel.

Napoleon Dynamite has been rereleased in a two-disc Special Edition just a few short months after its initial DVD release. It's a rather obvious attempt to get its fans to buy a second copy of the movie so they can have the new "special features." Save your money. The second disk is just another tired collection of the same cliché-ed features that get crammed into every other Special Edition. Guess what? Everyone laughs when they flub a line, the scenes cut from the original release were cut because they weren't funny, and everybody had a gosh-darn good time making this movie.