#jared hess

It’s funny reviewing this after my last two Project Hipster movie reviews, 12 Angry Men and Donnie Darko (pre-scheduled for closer to Halloween, of course.) Those are both small-scale, small budget endeavours, but both trying for grand thematic ambition through self-serious dialogue, for the former to unquestionable success, for the latter to, well, wait for Halloween (call it mixed.) On the other hand, the dialogue in Napoleon Dynamite is pretty much masterfully written and delivered, just as every shot is masterfully shot, to be as awkward, strange, and straight up deadpan funny as any sentence could ever be. That’s why any reference to it, online or in real life, will instantly devolve into quoting pretty much the entire movie. The crew and from the sounds of it about half of a cast (they filled in the rest with random locals) spent a month kicking around Jared Hess’ sleepy hometown of Preston, Idaho, recreating scenes from his childhood, everything from a hand-dancing club to crappy chicken farm workdays and a roadside cow shooting, and stringing it all together with a loose class election story that I guess you could say takes something from 1999’s Election. You could say that, but I won’t.

And that’s the attraction. The charm of Napoleon Dynamite is multifold; for one there’s the perfect visual language, wide shots of orange vans framed in the emptiness of grassy foothills and orthometric colour-coordinated Wes Andersonesque shots of characters framed by school lockers; the twinkly royalty-free music; and then there’s the charm that everyone, even the attractive and popular kids, is a little busted and weird by Hollywood gloss standards. It looks and sounds and feels a lot more like real life. If the indie and the hipster is the rejection of that which is so polished by mainstream crowd-pleasing as to become artificial, Napoleon Dynamite is a great showcase of how to follow the indie hipster line of thought and still create an absolute crowd pleaser. 

Napoleon himself is a dweeb of course, but also a chronic liar, generally apathetic to most things, not that there’s much to be passionate about, who throws back defensive snark (or what he thinks is snark) against bullies and family alike. Our hero, though this is a distinctly nonheroic world, not in a grim way, just in a slow and dawdling way, is a bit of a Holden Caulfield type in that sort of defensiveness, though that seems a weird comparison because there’s absolutely none of the attempt to project cool, or at least, not much success therein. Napoleon’s slack jaw, sweat pants, and weird little run aren’t exactly what the kids would call aura farming; though all of his t-shirts, and the thrifted suit, are awesome. Deb on the other hand kind of slays with her side ponytail, pastels, and big homemade puff sleeves. Pedro of course has his sweet bike jumps. There’s not much to really be heroic about in 2004 rural Idaho, though what there is to do is to make friends and stand together with the even more mawkish outcasts of this mawkish world. And to lay out the stylistic template for the next decade or so of hipsters. 

The core trio of Napoleon, Pedro, and Deb are the obvious characters to reach for when talking about alienation and a tone of gentle awkward loneliness pervading everything, but even the kinda-antagonists to Napoleon are steeped in it too. There’s Kip with an online love interest that we never see until the end, and Uncle Rico, who lived in a van on the wrong drainage slope of the Northwest and a decade too early for that to be cool, plotting to time travel (always remember to add the crystals) back to his glory days of high school football, days which don’t even sound particularly glorious in his reminiscences.  That side plot also gives us the iconic shot of Jon Heder getting nailed in the face with a greyish beef steak. Even the school bullies often seem more like they’d just rather be anywhere else. 

The final saving grace of Napoleon Dynamite (the guy and the movie both) is a charmingly positive ending, not in grand gestures (ok, so there’s one grand gesture involving a horse, which is, delightfully, hidden at the end of the credits, and of course the dance scene) but in a first date that in a wholesome twist of expectations refuses to be cynical about online interracial dating, in a simple tetherball game against prairie skies. In connection.

In conclusion,

I give this hipster movie a rating of friggin’ sweet

Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.

This review comes from the fourth result for "Hipster," "The Definitive Guide to Hipster Movies.”

Up next: something about boxing, I think. This new organization of the lists is throwing a lot of movies at me. But sooner or later I’ll get back around to books, and music, and different kinds of milk.