Directed by Jared Hess
Written by Jared Hess & Jerusha Hess
2004 | 95 minutes | English
DVD
Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, Tina Majorino, Diedrich Bader, Jon Gries, Aaron Ruell, Haylie Duff, Emily Kennard, Shondrella Avery, Sandy Martin
What it’s about: This slice-of-life style narrative follows the eponymous Napoleon (Hess), a teenager in Preston, a small town in southern Idaho. When his grandmother (Martin) injures her coccyx in an ATV accident at the dunes, his Uncle Rico (Gries) comes to stay with Napoleon and his older brother Kip (Ruell). As Rico dreams of past football glory, he gets Kip involved in selling tupperware so Kip can make money to bring his online girlfriend LaFawnduh (Avery) to Idaho to meet IRL. Meanwhile, Napoleon befriends Pedro (Ramirez), a new student from Mexico who has eyes on the class presidency, and encounters Deb (Majorino), an equally awkward, industrious girl who runs a glamour photography business.
Reflections: This movie hit a nerve when it came out, becoming kind of an iconic touchstone of a certain hip millennial whimsy. And coming back to it, it does still read that way–the closest analogue I can think of is like a rural farm-town version of Wes Anderson. The performances are stylized in a particular way, a kind of slow deadpan. The production design is elaborate and very intentional, capturing and only lightly exaggerating a time and place in a wash of textures and patterns and little details. And the movie takes its time drawing out the landscape and environment with quietly lush composition and lingering on a number of on-point needle drops.
The plot never has much momentum and the stakes are never very high. This is a film more interested in just observing a character and it centers on Heder’s eccentric performance. Napoleon is surly and put-upon, legitimately talented in a number of ways, but also oddly oblivious and deluded, cluelessly self-centered but genuinely caring. He’s one of the truest distillations of the weirdo-nerd kid in cinema. And, despite the cultural specificity of the film as a whole, his nerdishness isn’t tied to any kind of pop cultural trope; like the movie around him, he exists in his own world, but his challenges and dreams, and those of the oddballs in his orbit, feel larger than that world.
This is another movie that, because I was there for its moment (I was 19 when this was released, and it was very much to my taste at the time), I’m curious how people not of that era do or don’t relate to it. But watching it for the first time in a decade or so, I still found myself charmed. There are moments that make me cackle because of the ways in which they’re familiar more than anything, but it’s a mellow, restrained movie with a genuine empathy for all its subjects, even the popular kids. And when Napoleon urges Pedro before his big speech, “just listen to your heart; that’s what I do,” he sells it without being cheesy because you believe him.