Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

⭐⭐⭐⭐

96 minutes ‧ PG ‧ 2004
Cast: Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, Jon Gries
Director: Jared Hess
Genres: Comedy

I’ve watched Napoleon Dynamite an embarrassing number of times. And here’s the thing — it doesn’t get old. If anything, it gets better. Every rewatch, I catch something I missed, a look, a line, a background detail, and I end up laughing just as hard as I did the first time. There’s something almost unfair about how good this movie is.

It takes place in Preston, Idaho, which is exactly as quiet, flat, and wonderfully nowhere as it sounds. Napoleon is this tall, awkward kid who draws ligers in his notebook and talks to everyone as if they’re slightly disappointing him. He lives with his grandma and his older brother Kip, who is deeply committed to chatting with women online and not much else. When grandma gets hurt, Uncle Rico shows up to watch things — a man frozen in his high school football prime, living out of a van, trying to sell plastic Tupperware-type stuff door to door. And then Pedro arrives. He’s a new kid from Juárez.

That’s genuinely the whole plot without giving away any spoilers.

Jon Heder plays Napoleon, and it is a performance. The deadpan, the muttering, the way he breathes through his mouth and stares at things — it all sounds annoying on paper and is somehow perfect on screen. Efren Ramirez as Pedro is his total opposite: quiet, steady, oddly confident. They shouldn’t work together, and they completely do. Aaron Ruell as Kip nails this soft, earnest cluelessness that sneaks up on you. Jon Gries as Uncle Rico is heartbreaking in a funny way — a guy who genuinely believes his best days were in 1982 and has structured his entire identity around it. Tina Majorino as Deb is lovely and a little lost, and Haylie Duff makes Summer Wheatly exactly as insufferable as she needs to be. Diedrich Bader’s Rex shows up for about five minutes and steals his scenes completely.

And here’s the wild part: the director, Jared Hess, had never made a feature before. He wrote it with his wife Jerusha, loosely based on growing up in rural Idaho, and shot the whole thing in 23 days on a $400,000 budget. Four hundred thousand dollars. For a film that went on to make over $46 million and spawn a cult following that still hasn’t quit. People drove to Preston to see the actual filming locations. The town ran a Napoleon Dynamite festival for years — tetherball tournaments, tater tot contests, the works. A bronze statue of Napoleon ended up at the Fox studio lot for the 10th anniversary.

I get that it’s not for everyone. The comedy is dry and slow and trusts you to sit with the weirdness rather than hitting you over the head with punchlines. Some people watch it and don’t laugh once. Those people are welcome to their opinion. But if it clicks for you — and it might not click the first time — it really clicks. I’ve shown it to people who hated it, watched them roll their eyes, and then caught them quoting it a week later.

Watch it. If nothing else, you need to see the dance scene. You’ll know when you get there. Gosh.