Napoleon Dynamite

Anchorman was the funniest American comedy this year until Napoleon Dynamite, which is likewise a deadpan parody of a romance. The title character is a gape-mouthed, drowsy-eyed high-school kid in small-town Idaho who longs for the kind of skills that he imagines will make him popular with girls. (Among the things he considers "skills" are having a "sweet" bike and being able to grow a mustache.) To compensate for his lack of skills he fantasizes, exaggerates, and lies, and it isn't clear that he knows the difference. (He covers notebook pages with drawings of the "liger," a hybrid of lion and tiger "bred for its magical powers," and he talks about this beast not only as if other people could have heard of it but as if it were real.) Napoleon is a loser by most external standards and we're free to laugh at him because he's not even loveable. He has the petulance of an adolescent who's always ready to snap at people because they aren't able to guess what he's thinking. They actually have to ask him questions to find out. Idiots!

Jon Heder gives a classic slapstick performance, something along the lines of the silent great Harry Langdon, that sleepy-headed weirdo baby, after a hormonal growth spurt. You have to see Heder move; he runs, dances, and even swallows in gangly character. And he never appeals directly to the audience but understands that irony is a form of identification with character, with Napoleon's very awkwardness and preposterousness (as the co-writer and director Jared Hess makes clear in this interview with Screenwriter's Utopia).

Tina Majorino is nearly Heder's equal as the shy but enterprising girl who loves him. A gravely self-serious photo-i.d. photographer and lanyard artisan, she's got her own absurd dimness, an independent source of comedy, which is more than you can say for almost any heroine in Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, or Langdon. (Hess's wife Jerusha co-wrote the script with him and is probably responsible for the relatively soft-grained, characterful female slapstick.)

To maintain Anchorman's hermetic seal, Ferrell and the moviemakers no doubt had to win a staring contest with their distributor, and themselves. I hope Ferrell never blinks again. All the same, their movie is the work of fully-vested insiders compared to Napoleon Dynamite, which has a special grace, probably because Heder and the Hesses are young and unpracticed. (Their freshness is all over Jared's interviews with Screenwriter's Utopia and this one with IndieWire and this article in USA Today about Heder.)

In addition, all three are Mormons who met at Brigham Young University, which ought to turn all kinds of stereotypical notions on their heads. (Jared said to Screenwriter's Utopia, "I don't feel there is any Mormon culture in the film," but both Jared and Heder carried out two-year proselytizing missions and that experience may account for the number of people in Napoleon Dynamite who sell things door-to-door. ) These Mormon tyros make the big-industry comedians look square by comparison. (Click here for the MTV.com page on Napoleon Dynamite.)