Retardo Chic

WALKING THE thin line between ridicule and compassion, Napoleon Dynamite presents a teenage Idaho geek so out of step that he seems retarded. Napoleon (played by Jon Heder) is a lanky, goofy white youth with frizzy hair and a nasal voice who wears outdated aviator-frame eyeglasses. His name suggests a cruel hoax that started the day he was born. Now in high school, he gets mauled by jocks, ignored by most of his classmates and finds friends among other outcasts, namely the Mexican immigrant Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and the shy photography nerd Deb (Tina Majorino). He's both follower and leader, like Beavis and Butthead in one, but with clean thoughts.

Director Jared Hess, who co-wrote the film with his wife Jerusha Hess, is an Idaho native. Some odd conviction makes him pile on the weird behavior and void-like atmosphere, and this style turns Napoleon's life into deadpan comedy. Hess connects to the hip nerd sensibility of Wes Anderson (the credit sequence featuring various lunch-room plates containing idiosyncratic menu choices is done in the same flat catalog colors of The Royal Tenenbaums' credits). His title, taken from the cover art of Elvis Costello's 1986 Blood & Chocolate album (a painting of a monkey in Napoleonic head-dress) suggests a similar raging and primal egotism-the revenge of the nerds.

Napoleon's older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), lost in his own world of chat rooms and unable to find a soul mate in the flatlands of Idaho, might be even worse off. He embraces his anti-status, a defense mechanism that has made both brothers agelessly infantile. Who would expect boomer sentimentality or Gen-X rebellion to develop this way? Kip is said to be 33; Napoleon looks close to that. (Even Jake Gyllenhaal improbably cast as a teenager in The Day After Tomorrow was more youthful.) Both brothers seem the same age as their Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a salesman full of vaguely incestuous bravado. All three are hermetic narcissists who, in their out-of-it state, believe they know how to succeed better than anybody. Despite the apparent failure of their lives and the endless routine of rebuffs and patronization, they never give up.

By envisioning America as a place comprising flattened-out egos and would-be megalomaniacs, Napoleon Dynamite salutes the flipside of our celebrity culture. I sense a form of passive rebellion against the Hollywood Imperium in Hess' artless style. Not romantic, not cynical. Neither maudlin nor cruel, Napoleon Dynamite stays strangely remote, yet is occasionally funny-especially when its characters (a dune buggying grandma who keeps a pet llama, a tae kwan do instructor married to a buff musclewoman) are most pathetic. Audiences may feel some soul-saving necessity to embrace this kind of comedy as a sign that they haven't succumbed to the world's great, controlling hype machine. And beginning filmmakers like Hess (this is his feature debut) probably feel the same.

Napoleon Dynamite offers an eccentric form of humanism that derives more from pop music culture than from film. Like Wes Anderson's penchant for nearly obscure 60s pop (and really obscure alternative rock), Hess compiles a playlist of mostly nostalgic 80s hits: "Forever Young," "Time After Time" and "The Rose" (with its excruciating lyric "Some say love is a razor that leaves your soul to bleed"). Particularly affecting is When in Rome's "The Promise," a fey track that Hess reminds us is a song of absolutely winning optimism. Hess constructs his tiny worldview of Napoleon and Idaho's other inmates using the yearning for outward connection that comes from pop music-that habit of cultural projection that ironically reinforces your lonely separateness. (Think back on the Smiths verse "Don't forget the songs that made you cry/And the songs that saved your life/But you're older now/And you're a clever swine/But they were the only ones that ever stood by you.")

Part of the weird experience of Napoleon Dynamite is coming to terms with this new individualism. Hess has to tread lightly on Napoleon's awkwardness and drooling bathos. His frankness about "abnormal" behavior flirts with the audience's tendency toward snide superiority. Even clever swines can be repulsed by eccentricity (that was the trap of Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse). When Napoleon presents a hand-drawn portrait to a girl he wants to date, her cringing embarrassment conveys the disgust we all feel about being seen as pitiable-or being appreciated by those we feel are unworthy. The adolescent desire to be hip abides within, but Hess avoids that trap by recognizing that hipness is basically a desire for acceptance. Napoleon Dynamite becomes likable when Hess expands his characters' world of misfits. Napoleon is rescued by D-kwon's Dance Moves videotape. Kip finally meets his internet date LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), and they play footsie with his stockinged feet touching her bare toe-an image that goes just far enough.

Hess' taste for the peculiar is reminiscent of Shari Springer-Berman and Robert Pulcini's American Splendor (Marvin Gaye's "Ain't That Peculiar" was its inspired theme song). He avoids the freakish and the malevolent as favored in Saved!, Chuck & Buck or any Neil LaBute movie. A film graduate of Brigham Young University, Hess seems charitable, not vindictive like LaBute (who claimed to be a Mormon manque until his misanthropy became a fashionable part of indie culture). Hess' uncynical impulse is the big surprise of this movie-and of the neo-humanist movement it represents. (Racism gets neatly skewered when Haylie Duff as catty blonde Summer Wheatley casts aspersions about Pedro eating "chiminey changas.") Napoleon fulfills himself through friendship with Pedro and Deb; he struts proudly to the school dance, wearing an outdated brown suit with flared legs, wide lapels and a fist-knotted patterned tie. This iconographic shot isn't quite as joyous as the Farrelly brothers would film it. Hess' cartoon humanism lacks emotional amplitude. Still, it proclaims decency, no matter how unfashionable.

VIN DIESEL'S MUSCLE-HEAD persona suggests insecurity and a conventional style of overcompensation (especially his Bogart-bass monotone). His movie career as a biracial hunk reveals Diesel's own hip method of rebellion. In The Chronicles of Riddick, Diesel reprises his Pitch Black role as an intergalactic mercenary, this time caught in the middle of a war between space tribes. He helps the Furians fight off the Necromongers (undead conquerors who convert their adversaries to totalitarian sameness). Chronicles concerns identity crisis, starting with Diesel's. Riddick's pale eyes, supersensitive to light, have to see past everyone's facade. Director David Twohy conceives this film with the most overweening, sensual surfaces of any movie since The Scarlet Empress (Josef Von Sternberg's 1934 masterpiece where identity is formed by nature, social circumstance and political exigencies). Chronicles' bas-relief milieu matches Riddick's blue-gray pupils.

These ethnic and physical contrasts make up for Diesel and Twohy's action-movie excesses. Thandie Newton and Judi Dench play sensual and cerebral temptresses, both with confounding motives. The Matrix movies went buckwild and ludicrous in mixing sci-fi and structural anthropology; Chronicles stays coherent because it's all about Diesel's personal dilemma. Riddick's odyssey through the cosmos seizes upon doing the right thing, knowing oneself. The action-movie audience's identification with the hero no longer concerns a simple racial, or moral, ideal. Diesel has subsumed action traits from Bruce Lee, Shaft and Indy Jones to the Terminator into his own complex exercise of power. Chronicles takes him from urban Neanderthal close to sci-fi Shakespearean.

SEARCHING FOR THE phoniest moment in The Stepford Wives, I found: Christopher Walken using a faded, scratchy promotional film ("Is Stepford Right for You?") outlining the procedure for turning a community's women into robots. It's writer Paul Rudnick and director Frank Oz's insulting reliance on formulaic shtick satirizing old-timey docs. The original 70s cautionary fable in which men avenged themselves on rampant feminism is reduced to say that sexist indoctrination is easily overcome-a joke. Nicole Kidman, Glenn Close and Faith Hill already seem automatons, and Bette Midler (imitating Whoopi Goldberg) barely seems human. It's self-congratulatory camp (especially Rudnick's gay asides) indicting AOL and Disney-but not Viacom. Stepford ignores today's lobotomized feminism (Madonna, Britney). The filmmakers ought to confront Blade Runner's 1982 Rachael-the robot who cries-a confounding symbol of technological affect. Here the issues are as trifling as that old, fake doc. o