Dir: Jared Hess
Starring: Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez

"Putting the fun into dysfunctional" might have been the tag line of this light comedy about a summer in the life of a high-school kid and his family. Napoleon Dynamite comes from a long line of high school film dropouts and oddballs, but the character's own failure to think of himself as one of them makes this film surprisingly different. Napoleon, played wonderfully by Jon Heder, has obviously never taken the bully's comments to heart; a physically striking figure, from the moon-boots up, he also sports a ginger afro and bottle-thick glasses frame the actor's single facial expression that though it hardly changes in the course of the film, successfully suggests a range of attitudes - hurt, resentment, adolescent doubt, or thoughts about life revolved around slowly in Napoleon's head, like cud in a cow's mouth.

The film revolves around life's trials in an adolescent's summer. These include coping with an older brother and an uncle who moves into the family house (his parents are never mentioned), and the embarrassment that comes from his uncle's attempts to sell his breast-enhancing herbal products to the girls at high school and seduce their mothers; then there is the attempt to find a girl for the prom dance, and helping his misfit friend, the preturnaturally quiet Pedro (Efren Ramirez) become school President against competition from the in-crowd kids. Napoleon takes them on without thinking for a moment that he is a geek, or battling for acceptance, which makes the portrait subtly respectful; the big scene where he wins the election for Pedro is not played out for redemption. At the end of the film Napoleon goes back to being the only student capable of losing a game of tetherball against himself, but this time he has his valentine with him.

The treatment is episodic and slow, suggesting small-town life's motions as the complement to the dorkiness of the majority of the people portrayed. After the central character, the film's cool handling of the locals provides some funny moments, suggesting that Napoleon's oddity is only a symptom of some popular malaise; there is the farmer who shoots dead his cow in front of the schoolchildren's bus for instance. Or the chicken farmers seen drinking egg yolk in their spare moments. These glimpsed-in-passing characters offer a sort of desert-landscaped equivalent of the locals of the Coen brothers' Fargoe. The semi-documentary style suggests that Napoleon Dynamite has a comic original tucked away in the sleepy folds of Preson Idaho where the film is set (internet rumour suggests an autobiographical element from the writer-director, Jared Hess), just as some of the incidental moments seem drawn from life.

That said, taking a look at other reviews it seemed to me that the film had been over praised by the American critics, who were tired perhaps of star vehicle comedies. Napoleon Dynamite is closer to life than the average American comedy and intentionally or not this has the effect of bringing the effect of "it could happen to me" to work in the film, making people more likely to laugh at things that aren't particularly funny inventions. There is a good film in the making here but this one does not know its own strengths, mixing real, understated originality, with the farcical. The irony is that a film that was made by independents against the star vehicle trend has become one, just the same.

Certificate PG. 82 minutes.