Just in case you’re assembling a dossier on Anne and myself, we are in the habit of going to movies on Sunday afternoons. Our reasons for going then are pretty obvious, when you think about them: Sunday is the most unscheduled part of our average week, the theaters are rarely crowded on that day (we do live in church-going Utah, after all), and the matinee prices are easy on the checkbook. Generally, we like to make a nice, relaxing day of it by going out for brunch, possibly doing a bit of shopping, then catching a show in the 2-3 o’clock range. By Sunday evening we’re headed for home and I usually have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to say on this blog about whatever we saw (even if I don’t actually get around to saying it for several weeks, as in the cases of Collateral and Sky Captain).

Sunday afternoon this week followed our usual pattern: breakfast at Denny’s, a quick run through Costco for bulk groceries and the latest DVDs, and then a movie. But this week the process stalled out at this stage. The words for the blog failed to come that evening and even now, 48 hours later, I’m still not sure what to say about a weird little film called Napoleon Dynamite.

Anne’s attitude, which isn’t without merit, is that the movie already leeched away two precious hours of our lives and I shouldn’t devote any further effort to discussing it. She says that if she were in my place, she’d simply post, “it sucks, don’t waste your time.” But I am far more combative, masochistic, and stubborn than Anne when it comes to this sort of thing — it isn’t enough for me simply to say it sucks. I must desconstruct its suckiness, to find out exactly what the hell this thing was supposed to be and how it failed to live up to that goal.

Actually, “What the hell?” is a phrase that occurred to me often while watching Napoleon Dynamite. Roughly every ten minutes, as I recall. Throughout the film’s runtime I had the uncomfortable feeling that someone was playing a practical joke on me and my girlfriend, and that we were the only people in the room who hadn’t figured it out yet… a feeling that was reinforced by the laughter of all the folks around us, who apparently got the point that Anne and I kept missing.

The set-up for this scam of a movie was brilliant, starting with a quiet but persistent buzz that I’ve been hearing for months. In fact, ND has achieved a near-mythic quality here in the Salt Lake area, mostly because of the film’s ties to the Mountain West region and because it’s always a good story when the little guys somehow manage to attract national attention. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me explain that Napoleon Dynamite is an independent film written and directed by a BYU student named Jared Hess, shot on location in Hess’ hometown of Preston, Idaho, and based (loosely, I hope) on his own experiences of growing up in that isolated, tiny, rural setting. The movie received a lot of attention on the festival circuit, notably from Utah’s own Sundance Festival, and the Tomatometer — a web site that compiles all the available reviews for a given film and computers an average rating — shows ND with an unusually high rating of 72%. Even my local film critic, Sean Means of the Salt Lake Tribune, called ND “a goofy charmer.”

Based on all that evidence, plus my own affection for small movies made with heart, I figured Anne and I were in for something special. I was expecting one of the rare gems that sometimes emerges from Sundance to become a modest classic (El Mariachi, for example). What we actually got was… baffling.

I blame myself for forgetting that so much of what comes from the independent circuit is self-conscious, self-indulgent, and just plain weird. ND certainly qualifies for the third category, and probably for the middle one as well.

The title character in Napoleon Dynamite is a nerd of the lowest caste (yes, nerds have a pecking order, too), a guy so colossally uncool that even Dr. Who fans wouldn’t hang out with him. (I can say this with some degree of authority because I was a Dr. Who fan in one of my earlier incarnations, and even I would’ve picked on somebody like Napoleon.) Napoleon wears moon boots with Hammer pants, brags about his skills with nunchuckus and the bo staff, and fancies himself an artist, even though his art work resembles something Picasso might have produced if he were smoking crack. He is a type of person I’ve encountered from time to time who compensates for his utter lack of social skills by adopting a sort of geeky belligerence, the “I know you are but what am I?” attitude.

Napoleon lives with his brother Kip, who is an entirely different sort of nerd (but no less hostile to those who would question his outrageous statements), and their grandmother. The plot — such as it is — gets underway when Grandma is injured while riding a four-wheel ATV and the boys’ uncle Rico, a frustrated loser who never got past the big high-school football game, moves in to care for them.

The film wanders aimlessly from one event to the next, sort of constructing a story but not one you could really describe to anyone. It’s like the bizarro-world version of a John Hughes movie, the same kind of picaresque high school experience, only drained of all the qualities that made those films so endearing. While Hughes presented us with characters who were pretty far down the social ladder (Ferris Bueller and his apparently wealthy friends notwithstanding) but ultimately noble and likable — nerds who were just like us — Hess gives us people who are utterly, even defiantly unsympathetic. Napoleon, Kip and Rico are not lovably eccentric, nor are they folks that I think an average audience can identify with. We don’t grow to understand what makes them tick, and they never learn, grow or evolve in any appreciable way (although Kip does manage to get married and Napoleon sort of — there’s that phrase again! — finds a girlfriend).

I suppose some credit must be given to Hess for resisting the easy route of formula, and the movie is certainly true-to-life. I personally have encountered people very similar to all of the characters in the film, but I haven’t wanted to spend much time around them, and this movie doesn’t give me much of a reason to change my mind about that. If Hess was trying to make a point about people like Napoleon Dynamite, or indeed any point at all, I have to admit that I missed it. But then I’ve missed the point of a lot of recent comedies. In the last few years, a new subgenre seems to have arisen, a type of comedy based around stupid people doing stupid things. Instead of enlisting our sympathies, such films expect us to laugh down at obnoxious characters we have no affection for and no interest in seeing redeemed. The Jackass TV series, the humor of Tom Green, and most of Adam Sandler’s films seem to take this approach. A lot of people like that sort of thing. I don’t. I don’t think it’s funny. I don’t get the joke.

One final criticism of Napoleon Dynamite, and this is a pretty nitpicky one: what the hell time period is it supposed to occupy? Based on clothing and home decor, it looks like it’s sometime in the early to mid-80s, but Kip meets his wife in an Internet chat room and Rico talks longingly of his perfect year, 1982. Is Jared Hess trying to tell us that Preston, Idaho, is stuck in the ’80s? That could be potentially very funny, but the point was never made clearly enough in this film for it to amount to anything. As I said, it’s a nitpicky point of criticism, but it was really troubling me throughout the film, enough that it became distracting. Not that there was much to be distracted from. As I said earlier, I walked out of the theater feeling like I’d been had. I will acknowledge emitting a few laughs, but in general this movie just lurched along, as spastically as its title character, just like the kid you occasionally had to endure sitting next to you on the bus until you finally reached his stop and, to your everlasting relief, he went away. You may have felt guilty for being so unkind as to feel that way, but you were still glad he was gone.

Or, to put it another way (Anne’s way), “It sucks, don’t waste your time.”