One of the previews that our local theater ran before the matinee showing of Napoleon Dynamite was for a Hilary Duff movie, the point of which seemed to be that if you follow your heart, your dreams will come true. The irony is that Hilary Duff's sister, Haylie, is in Napoleon Dynamite, playing Hilary Duff. By that, I don't mean the character Hilary Duff always plays in her movies. Hilary Duff always plays a social misfit, who more popular kids are mean to, so that she can weep prettily for a couple hundred frames, before she decides she has to follow her heart, so that her dreams will come true. But Hilary Duff is only a social misfit in the alternate universe of the Walt Disney corporation, where the real messiness and violence and crippling self-hatred of genuine social misfittedness can never be allowed to intrude on the Family Values and Instilling of Good Moral Principles, and Positive Messages where the real money is made. Real teenage social misfits don't look like Hilary Duff. The real Hilary Duffs of the world are too running roughshod over the other kids in the school on their way to making their dreams come true; their demons tend more towards bulimia. I'm using Hilary Duff purely iconically, you understand--I'm sure the real Hilary Duff is very nice.

The point is, Napoleon Dynamite manages to be tremendously funny while, at no time, dodging or ducking or avoiding the real messiness and violence and crippling self-hatred of genuine social misfittedness. Jared Hess knows that high school is a place where, for no reason and with no warning, a bigger, more coordinated kid will come up to you and slam you into the lockers, and where your only possible response will be, much too late, to ineffectually kick in your tormentor's general direction. It's such a truthful movie, on so many levels, despite its somewhat distanced, Coen Brothers' hip, stylization. Napoleon (played with deadpan perfection by Jon Heder, a current animation student at BYU), is a tall, geeky looking kid with a bad blonde perm, moon boots, and a shambling, forward leaning run. The more popular kids in Preston (ID) HS make fun of him, or beat him up, and he has no recourse. And so he lives in a fantasy world, drawing ligers (half-lion, half-tiger), wishing he knew martial arts, and muttering about all the "idiots" that surround him. (I know that kid. Except for the perm, I was that kid. Plus I couldn't draw. But I did love tetherball.) But at the end of the film--and I know this is harsh, and I don't mean to be this dismissive, because I do love this film, but it has to be said--this turns out to be something awfully close to a Hilary Duff movie. The film has, I'm sorry to say, a happy ending. Appallingly enough, the film comes perilously close to saying that if you follow your heart, your dreams will come true. The ending is really a mistake, frankly, and it was so avoidable. And throughout the rest of the movie, we can see that Jared knows better.

The film is essentially built around two triangular relationships. At school, Napoleon has basically two friends: Pedro, a Mexican kid played with this tremendously expressive deadpan by Efran Ramirez, and Deb (Tina Majorino), an intense, unsmiling girl with a hideous pigtail, who loves photography. The first time we meet Deb, she's trying to pay for college by selling, door to door, handicrafted key chains, but she can't get through her door approach without bursting into tears and running off, leaving behind her sample cases. The second main relationship is between Napoleon, his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), and his uncle Rico (Jon Gries). Kip and Napoleon live with their grandmother--we're never told where their parents are, but we presume that they're dead. Grandma is injured in a ATV accident, and so Uncle Rico comes to live with the boys. Uncle Rico is a failed football hero reduced to selling Tupperware. He imagines himself a real ladies' man, but his pretentious and petty conceits are utterly transparent--really, he just wants to live his life over again, and eventually orders a time machine off the internet. Meanwhile, there's Napoleon's brother Kip, a thirty one year old well of curdled bitterness, smaller than Napoleon and nastier, an unemployed and unemployable little man who spends his days in internet chat rooms, trying to find True Love. In one of the most amazing shots in the film, we see Kip, who's beyond humiliation, in roller blades he can barely use, being towed around town by Napoleon, who's riding a bike.

Some have criticized the film as nothing but a series of vignettes, but it's actually beautifully structured. Everyone in the film is on the hustle, trying to get ahead, trying to follow their narrow little hearts, so their dreams can come true. Rico enlists Kip to help him sell Tupperware. Rico actually has something of a knack for it; Kip, of course, is hopeless. But we get this sense that everyone in Preston, Idaho is filled with longing and desperate for something better. Rico's hamhanded charm actually works a little--you can see why Preston's homemakers want to buy his Tupperware. Napoleon asks one of the popular girls in school to the big school dance by drawing a picture of her. His drawing is awful; her eyes much too far apart, her forehead flat. But her mother thinks it's fabulous, and insists that the girl accept the date, though she'd clearly rather be anywhere on earth than out with Napoleon. At the dance, she ditches him within minutes, and so Pedro, out with Deb (whose crush on Napoleon, Napoleon has been far too clueless to pick up on), generously lets Napoleon dance with Deb.

The dance is fabulous--it's the first high school dance in a movie I've ever seen that looks like a real high school dance. None of the kids can dance at all, and they all look self-conscious, awkward and out of place, and yet the movie treats them generously--it's not campy, like the Singles dances in Singles Ward. Jared knows it's funnier just to get the details right--you don't have to push how funny you're being. For example, there's a tremendous amount of food in the film--we see a lot of meals. And the food is all awful--horrible congealed cheese sauce melted onto nachos, cheap cuts of steak badly cooked, tater tots, bologna sandwiches on plates buzzing with flies. You cringe every time someone eats. But the food isn't treated as the punchline to a gag. It's just what these people eat.

The characters are all striving, all trying to get somewhere in life, and it's amazingly funny and real. Napoleon bemoans his lack of "skills." "Girls like guys with skills," he says. And "skills," it becomes clear, is somehow linked to coolness. Napoleon and Kip, for example, attend a free Tae Kwon Do lesson, taught by Rex (Dietrich Bader), because they both are desperate to learn martial arts, which they refer to constantly.

I especially love the fascination these small town white characters have for black culture. Napoleon spends endless hours trying to learn how to dance, specifically, how to dance like a black guy. I remember that; most of my friends in Indiana watched Soul Train religiously, trying to pick up on some of the moves. It's not an accident, I think, that when Kip eventually does meet his soul mate on-line, she's black. And when we meet Kip's true love, LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), we can see why she's so beautiful to him--she's literally everything he's not. (Watching Kip affecting gangsta rap mannerisms and clothing may be the funniest thing in the movie). My wife couldn't figure out why LaFawnduh would be interested in Kip, but I think I can see it--he's also everything she's not, especially with computers. But it's very clear that Napoleon has no idea what to do with LaFawnduh--she's utterly exotic to him, and therefore completely fascinating.

Jared Hess is LDS--he's still a current BYU student, though I'd be surprised if he were to finish his degree, given the success of this film. Is this an LDS film? If we define LDS films as films exploring LDS culture, then Napoleon Dynamite is borderline. At no point do any of the characters say or do anything that would specifically suggest LDSness, and if not for one tiny hint of a lay clergy, I would say that it has no LDS overtones at all. But in other ways, it feels very LDS. A rural, insular culture, obsessed with get-rich-quick schemes, obsessed with The World, which is on the one hand idolized, and on the other hand rejected, fascinated by exotic, enticing African-American-based pop culture; man, I see Mormonnesses all through this film.

And like ALL the other LDS films that have been made so far, this film has a very peculiar take on family. In Napoleon Dynamite, "family" is out to get you. "Family" is where they throw food at you while you're riding in a vehicle. The film isn't built on the crushingly inhuman sociopathy of the families in the Halestorm films. But it's close; Napoleon's family is pretty frightening. At no point, except at the very end of the film (which, as I've said, is its one great weakness), does anyone in the family show the tiniest hint of warmth, or support, or kindness. Napoleon and Kip and Uncle Rico are just stuck together, living in this hideous red brick house with a satellite dish, all that wood paneling, and one phone with a really long phone cord. We can see where Napoleon gets his abruptness, his complete inability to leave even the most inappropriate comments unspoken. (Meeting Deb in the cafeteria, he says "I see you're drinking one percent milk. Is that because you don't want to drink whole milk because you think you're fat? Because you're not.") No one in his family ever even considers sparing anyone else's feelings. It's very interesting--we pay so much lip service to family values in LDS culture, but our films betray us--we don't seem to actually believe it, or live it.

The ending is a mistake, I think.

SPOILER ALERT: SKIP THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING. At the end of the film, Pedro is running for student body president, against Haylie Duff. They're supposed to each give a talk, and they both do; Pedro's is predictably awkward and unconvincing. They're also supposed to "do a skit." Hilary Duff does a cheerleading routine, passably. She's going to win. Then Napoleon gets up and dances, to music given him by LaFawnduh. His dance is amazing--he's geeky, and untalented and it's funny, but he's also pretty good, all things considered. For a kid who can't dance, he can really dance. And the "coolness of black culture vs. the unhipness of white culture" theme is well enough developed in the film that it makes sense that the other kids in this small Idaho school would think that Napoleon is terrific--he's better, cooler, than anything they've ever seen before, even though he's not actually, you know, good. But the reality is that, most of the time, for most people, following your heart WON'T result in your dreams coming true, and Jared Hess knows it. It's a copout, and a mistake, to have Pedro win the election. Too formulaic a happy ending, for a film that's otherwise original and true and terrific.

That's not a minor quibble. The endings of things really do matter. But the rest of Napoleon Dynamite is so devastatingly funny, so cruelly, viciously, truthfully funny, so bitingly funny, I'm willing to forgive it a lot. It's just stylized enough we have the distance we need to laugh. But it's a bleak world, high school is, for the socially inept, no matter what Hilary Duff movies say.

Eric Samuelsen