Gosh

I watched Napoleon Dynamite for the second time yesterday, which turned out to be a good thing. The first time I saw it, about three weeks ago, I could barely sit through its eighty-or-so minutes. There's not much of a story here, but that seems intentional. The film is quite stylish, so no problems there. And the acting is superb - though I don't know how much range the principals have. Their futures may not be as bright as they think.

The eponymous hero of the film is so backwards he's just about forward again. His precious older brother Kip is touchingly portrayed, as is Uncle Rico, who's stuck in the third quarter of a championship football game in 1982. These losers are sad losers, not like the asshole losers who torment Napoleon all day long.

What drove me nuts the first time around was the fact that, though stuff happens in the movie, nothing really happens. And in between the bits of something that amount to nothing is a bunch of nothing that's always been nothing and will forever be nothing. Think of a Wes Anderson movie minus the charm and the weight.

On second viewing, with the knowledge that I was in for 80 minutes of nothing, I was able to enjoy the film. It occurred to me about twenty minutes in that everything that came out of Napoleon's, Kip's or Rico's mouths was basically funny. From childish insults (Deb: "I'm selling these so I can save some money and go to college." Kip, off-screen: "Your mom goes to college.") to frustrated grunts ("Idiot!") to the idiosyncracies that make or break characters ("It's pretty much my favourite animal"), the dialogue was crisp and funny. Let me qualify that further - lots of things are funny in a reflective or ironic way. This film had us laughing out loud throughout.

So it's unfortunate that, pace a second chance, I find myself sharing Napoleon's own frustration. What could have been a dynamite recurring skit on Saturday Night Live, or a great vehicle for a hipster "retro" sitcom, got stretched to a feature-length film. Twenty-two minutes of concentrated Napoleon would be, indeed, dynamite. By making a movie out of it, Jared (director, writer) and wife Jerusha (writer) Hess tried to infuse the story with affection for a North American world as distant from pop sensibility as possible. In so doing, they set themselves up for failure. As New Yorker critic David Denby put it, "The movie might have worked if it weren't so dead-aired, malicious, and cool." By expressing their own strong feelings for a world they may not quite have left behind using an ultra-cool, ironic sensibility, the Hesses end up undermining the film's soul.

But dammit if I haven't been walking around saying, Gosh! for three weeks now.