Review: Napolean Dynamite (B)

First, a tangent…

(Wait, is it still a ‘tangent’ if I start with it? Never mind…)

Storytelling is an art, and there’s a right and a wrong way to tell funny stories. For example, compare and contrast the following experiences involving missionaries in the MTC:

(A) MTC Teacher: “…and then Alma and Amulek returned to the land of Zarahemla.” [puts down his book] “You know, that reminds of a funny story from my mission. One day, my companion and I were riding our bikes to an appointment, and…”

(B) MTC Teacher A: “…and then the servants gathered the severed arms and brought them back to the king.” [puts down his book while MTC Teacher B enters]

Teacher A: “Hey, have you told my class the BICYCLE STORY yet?”

Teacher B: “No, I haven’t.  But if I tell it to them now, they’ll be laughing so hard they won’t focus on their lessons the rest of the day.”

Teacher A: “Too bad.” [turns to class] “You guys are missing out! The BICYCLE STORY is one of the funniest mission stories you’ll ever hear. When he told it to another class, a couple of elders laughed so hard they almost threw up!”

Teacher B: “We should film it next time I tell it so we have a record of it. I’m just worried people will be laughing so hard we won’t be able to hear the words on the tape.”

Teacher A: “I know, why don’t we make the BICYCLE STORY a reward to the class for working hard at learning Chinese?”

Teacher B: “Good idea!” [turns to class] “Okay, elders, if you work really hard for the next two weeks at studying your language I’ll come back and tell you the BICYCLE STORY as a reward…”

(No points for guessing which of the two really happened when I was in the MTC…)

Note that in both cases the story itself is exactly the same.  Imagine how the experience hearing the story changes after having either (A) or (B) as a ‘prelude’, though.  After we worked hard for two weeks (with the teachers constantly reminding us how funny the story was going to be) what happened when we got our “reward” was predictable.  “Underwhelmed” would be an understatement.

Problem #1 was that Teacher B committed the first cardinal sin of telling stories (“Never laugh at your own story while you’re telling it”) and Problem #2 was…well, you know: no story could possibly be THAT funny.   Had he simply just started telling us the story that first day without hyping it up first (let alone turning it into a ‘reward’) the experience would almost certainly have been better, simply because we weren’t expecting anything at that point.  Hype leads to expectations, and expectations — as was the case with the infamous “Bicycle Story” — can lead to disappointment.

Napoleon Dynamite is a good film. But it is also a film where its own hype is its own worst enemy. Painting a film as a ‘comedy’ in the first place — let alone “one of the funniest comedies of the year” — paints expectations right from the beginning.  Dramas can have jokes and humorous elements — many do, naturally — but they are not required nor expected.  You expect to laugh at a comedy just as you expect to be scared by a “horror” movie.  Expectations can lead to disappointment if they are not met.

Everyone loves good comedies.  But the late Gene Siskel had a saying that comedy and romance are the two most subjective things on the planet — if you don’t think something is funny or erotic, there is absolutely nothing that anyone can say that could ever change your mind.  Napoleon Dynamite *is* a funny movie — we should be clear here — but it’s a different sort of beast than, say, The Princess Bride or The Emperor’s New Groove.  At its heart, Napolean Dynamite is an independent art film — with an understated, quirky sense of humor.  It’s a film that (just as it started out) is one that is shown to smaller, more selective, audiences at film festivals and is not meant for wide release.  Like “The Blair Witch Project” before it, Napolean Dynamite found some initial success and great word-of-mouth, which lead to wider releases, larger marketing campaigns (“One of the funniest movies of the year!”), more word-of-mouth (“You’ve GOT to see it! It is SO funny!”) to the extent that a backlash was probably inevitable.

And that’s too bad, because this movie is clearly not made for a wide audience, and may have been better served remaining obscure.  I have to imagine that the subset of the population who would really find this movie funny is very small, and the end result of the hype was inevitably going to be a lot of people who would never have set foot in a film festival, but who end up buying into the hype, watching this and thinking “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen…” You can’t blame the filmmakers — Jared and Jerusha Hess — for wanting to attract the most people possible to their movie, (and, you know, make more money too) but surely even they would have to admit their film is not for everyone.

Napolean Dynamite does a lot of things right, one of which is not laughing at its own jokes. (In fact, I’m hard pressed to remember if any single character ever laughed at anything the entire movie).  One of its biggest assets is the deadpan way the characters move from scene to scene, totally oblivious to their own idiocy and to anything remotely funny or amusing going on. There is no obvious setup >> punch line >> pause for the laughtrack to kick in sitcom-style mugging here — you could almost say there are no ‘jokes’ in Napolean Dynamite at all. If you found something that happened funny, great!  But the movie has already moved on to the next scene without waiting for you.

The three main actors (Napoleon, Pedro, and Deb) are note-perfect in their roles in both looks and delivery. Their deadpan style of speaking their lines, in fact, pushes some of the dialogue from ‘normal and uninteresting’ to ‘absurdly amusing’ (Note, for example, the scene at the dance where Napoleon asks Pedro and Deb “Are you having the time of your lives?” and both reply “Yes” in just the perfect tone of voice. Note also Pedro’s speech at the class assembly where he tells everyone, in total deadpan: “Vote for me…(pause)…and your wildest dreams…(pause)…will come true.”)

My wife and I may not have laughed out loud much during the movie, yet both of us still enjoyed it on its own merits. And I can testify — as others have — that some of the lines are really memorable, and probably funnier upon reflection weeks and months after the fact than when the movie was actually playing.  (“Can you get your stuff out of my locker — I don’t have room for my ‘num-chuks’…”, or ‘I caught you a delicious bass’ come to mind.)

Perhaps our good experience was in spite of the hype rather than because of it.  My wife — who doesn’t pay attention to the movie marketing scene, hadn’t heard of the movie and came in with a ‘clean slate’.  And I, having had the earlier “Bicycle Story” experience, thought: “There’s no way the movie is really going to be THAT funny”.   And it probably wasn’t…but (ironically) expecting to be disappointed kept me from actually being disappointed.  (Good luck parsing that sentence…)

Is that unfair to say the secret to Napolean Dynamite is keeping the expectations low so you’re not disappointed?  Possibly.  It’s a good film that shouldn’t be placed on too high a pedestal, but rather a film that deserves a chance to “sneak up” on you (if that’s even possible, given the media exposure) and leave you thinking afterwards: “You know, that wasn’t too bad…”

Final Grade: B

Analysis and Other Comments (possible spoilers):

(1) Humor is a funny thing (…literally!): it’s almost entirely dependant on the individual, yet there are psychological factors that can come into play as well. Take the following joke, for example:

You ‘get’ the joke if you happen to know what the words ‘insomniac’, ‘agnostic’ and ‘dyslexic’ mean — part of the enjoyment of such a joke comes from being smart enough to understand what the punchline means in the first place.  That’s why explaining a joke after it’s been told never works:  you’ve just removed the enjoyment from figuring out the joke on your own.

One role of humor is ego-soothing — both in the appeal to intelligence (for clever punchlines like the one above) as well as the emphasis in ‘stupid’ humor in both movies and TV shows.  Characters saying and doing stupid things — think Homer Simpson — have been a staple of TV and film comedies for decades.  What’s the appeal?  Probably because it’s funny and ego-soothing at the same time.  The average person can laugh and think, “I would never say (or do) that — I’m too smart for that…” Would “Seinfeld” have been half as funny if the four main characters weren’t obviously all total losers?

I think that is one of the primary reasons a lot of people have found Napoleon Dynamite to be funny — the characters in ND are almost universally backwards, uneducated losers. You can laugh at their antics (like the incident with the online ‘time machine’), and then subconsciously be thinking “I’m so much smarter (and socially adept) than they are…that’s why I can laugh at them.”

So, perhaps that’s Napoleon’s main attraction: He’s somewhat likable, yet hopelessly backwards — enough to let you root for him, while feeling superior to him at the same time…