Reel Classics: ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ (2004)

In 2004, a very quirky film was released after hav­ing found fame at the Sundance Film Festival. Fox Searchlight Pictures, Paramount Pictures and MTV Films part­nered to bring this film to the the­ater screen. It’s lead actor, Jon Heder, was paid $1,000 to appear in the film — which had a bud­get of $400,000. Filming was com­plet­ed in 22 days. It went on to earn over $40 mil­lion in the USA and over $46 mil­lion world-wide. It has also gone on to become a cult classic. 

Our Reel Classic is Napoleon Dynamite.

The sto­ry is set in Preston, Idaho and fea­tures a vari­ety of quirky char­ac­ters that include 16 year-old Napoleon (Jon Heder) and his old­er broth­er Kip (Aaron Ruell) who both live with their grand­moth­er Carlinda Dynamite (who has a pet lla­ma named Tina). Napoleon is social­ly awk­ward and Kip is dead into tech­nol­o­gy. Early on the grand­moth­er informs the boys that she will be going out of town for a night but will be back the next day. They soon learn that she had gone with friends to ride a dune bike and broke her tail­bone. She has asked their Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) to come stay with them.

Uncle Rico is a char­ac­ter him­self. He lives in a van and con­tin­ues to relive his high school days from 1982 when he was a foot­ball play­er on the high school team. He pro­fess­es that if only the coach had put him in the game in the fourth quar­ter, the team would have won the state cham­pi­onship and he would have gone on to a suc­cess­ful NFL career and be liv­ing in a man­sion with mil­lions of dol­lars. If only he could go back in time. In fact, he even pur­chas­es a “time machine” online to take him back to 1982. Both he and Napoleon try it out with unex­pect­ed results.

Meanwhile, Kip is enam­ored with a woman he has met online named LaFawnduh who lives in Detroit, Michigan. He spends a good part of his day on the com­put­er in chat rooms. Napoleon becomes friends with a new stu­dent arriv­ing at the high school by the name of Pedro (Efren Ramirez). Pedro and his fam­i­ly are orig­i­nal­ly from Juarez, Mexico. Napoleon also becomes friends with a shy young class­mate named Deb who sells items door-to-door to raise mon­ey for col­lege, and pho­tographs folks to earn mon­ey. Napoleon takes a lik­ing to her but is awk­ward in his interactions.

Meanwhile, back at the house, Uncle Rico comes up with a plan to try to earn some mon­ey and enlists Kip in his efforts. Kip needs to raise some mon­ey so he can pay for LaFawnduh to come vis­it him from Detroit. They set up a door-to-door sales plan sell­ing Tupperware-like prod­ucts. Uncle Rico uses his flir­ta­tious charms as a means to encour­age the ladies to buy his wares.

The high school is hav­ing a dance and Pedro wants to invite the pop­u­lar Summer Wheatly to the dance. Summer, a bit of a snob, quick­ly refus­es. Pedro then asks shy Deb and she accepts, though she seemed hope­ful that Napoleon would ask her. Pedro encour­ages Napoleon to ask some­one and he choos­es to ask Summer’s friend Trisha. As it so hap­pens, Uncle Rico has been using his charm on Trisha’s mom to get her to buy his kitchen­ware and she tells her daugh­ter to accept Napoleon’s invi­ta­tion — know­ing he is Rico’s nephew. Trisha reluc­tant­ly agrees but aban­dons Napoleon as soon as they get to the dance. Napoleon does get to dance with Deb.

Elections for school pres­i­dent arrive and of course the pop­u­lar Summer Wheatly choos­es to run. Pedro also decides to run and has the help of his two friends Napoleon and Deb. They put up posters for Pedro and even have a t‑shirt print­ed that says “Vote for Pedro.” To enhance their chances Pedro and Napoleon enter a Future Farmers of America com­pe­ti­tion and earn medals for grad­ing milk cow’s udders and milk. The medals do lit­tle to influ­ence the oth­er students.

In the mean­time, Uncle Rico has come up with a new prod­uct to sell claim­ing to be a breast-enhance­ment prod­uct. He berates Napoleon and tries to sell the prod­uct to Deb stat­ing Napoleon sug­gest­ed it. Deb becomes angry and is no longer friend­ly with Napoleon. LaFawnduh has arrived and is trans­form­ing Kip. She also gives Napoleon a mix­tape of dance music as he is work­ing on his dance moves.

Eventually school elec­tion day arrives and the can­di­dates are to address the stu­dent pop­u­la­tion. Summer takes the stage and promis­es vend­ing machines and fol­lows up her speech with a dance skit with her friends. Pedro feels hope­less but goes on to give his less than hope­ful speech and despon­dent­ly walks off the stage. Napoleon decides to per­form the skit for Pedro, gives the mix­tape to the sound engi­neer and takes the stage to per­form his prac­ticed dance moves. To his and everyone’s sur­prise (espe­cial­ly the smug Summer), he receives a stand­ing ova­tion. Deb leads the way for the response from the stu­dents and Pedro is encouraged.

As the sto­ry pro­gress­es we learn what will come of the rela­tion­ships between Kip and LaFawnduh, Napoleon and Deb as well as what is in store for Uncle Rico and for Grandma. We also learn the out­come of the school elec­tion and Pedro’s fate.

Napoleon Dynamite began as a project of two stu­dents at Brigham Young University. Jon Heder and Jared Hess were film stu­dents and worked on a nine minute short film as a class project. It was enti­tled Peluca and was about a nerdy high school stu­dent named Seth. It was shown at a film fes­ti­val and was very well received. A film pro­duc­er, Jeremy Coon, encour­aged Jared Hess to con­sid­er adapt­ing it into a fea­ture length film and helped him find finan­cial back­ers. Hess and his wife Jerusha wrote the screen­play and dropped out of school while work­ing on the film. Hess was also the direc­tor. Though oth­er actors were sug­gest­ed for the role of Napoleon, Hess was con­vinced that only Jon Heder could play the character.

The film was shot in Preston, Idaho and many of the roles were played by friends and class­mates of Hess. Reportedly var­i­ous folks from Preston offered their homes and food to the cast and crew dur­ing the film­ing. Though the film is set dur­ing 2004–2005, we see a lot of ref­er­ences to the 1980s. The com­put­er (a dial-up inter­net con­nec­tion), the Walkman cas­sette play­er, the VCR play­er and much of the music harken back to the 80s.

Another unusu­al aspect of this quirky film is the open­ing cred­its. At the sug­ges­tion of Aaron Ruell, who played Kip, the cred­its are offered up on plates of food, chap stick, and a stu­dent ID. One of the cred­its is demon­strat­ed by a card indi­cat­ing UFO Abduction Insurance (don’t leave Earth with­out it). Reportedly such insur­ance actu­al­ly exists with Lloyd’s of London offer­ing such cov­er­age to more than 30,000 pol­i­cy­hold­ers. Reportedly you can get the cov­er­age for only $20 per month (if you hap­pen to be interested).

Speaking of cred­its, this film offers a prime exam­ple of why I nev­er leave a film until the cred­its have com­plete­ly run. How many of us have seen folks get up and leave the the­ater as soon as the end cred­its begin to roll? With this film, there is a scene after the cred­its last­ing five min­utes that give us an update on the char­ac­ters a few months after the end. You don’t want to miss that!

Not only was the film a box office suc­cess, but it spawned a great deal of mer­chan­dise includ­ing Vote for Pedro t‑shirts, cof­fee mugs, bob­ble­head fig­ures, Halloween cos­tumes, and refrig­er­a­tor mag­nets. The city of Preston, Idaho held a “Napoleon Dynamite Festival” for a num­ber of years after the release of the film. Events at the fes­ti­val includ­ed a teth­erball tour­na­ment, a tater tot eat­ing con­test, a Moon Boot dance, a foot­ball throw­ing con­test, and a char­ac­ter look-a-like con­test. I hear those of you now who have not seen this movie say­ing “What on earth?” But, watch the film and it will all make sense.

Critical reviews were some­what mixed. This is one of those films where you “get it” and you like it, or you “don’t get it” and you don’t like it. Not unusu­al in the class of films we describe as “cult clas­sics.” The crit­ic for The Village Voice described the film as “an epic, mag­is­te­ri­al­ly observed pas­tiche on all-American geek­hood, floor­ing the com­pe­ti­tion with a petu­lant shove.” The New York Times review­er praised the efforts of Jon Heder and the “film’s most inter­est­ing qual­i­ty, which is its stub­born, con­fi­dent, alto­geth­er weird indi­vid­u­al­i­ty.” Entertainment Weekly praised the char­ac­ter Napoleon Dynamite, say­ing “A high school mis­fit found a sweet spot, tap­ping into our inner dork.” Critics on the Rotten Tomatoes site describes it as “charm­ing” and “quirky.”

I will share a per­son­al mem­o­ry regard­ing this film. After its release sev­er­al of the par­tic­i­pants toured the US pro­vid­ing insights into the film and par­tic­i­pat­ing in a ques­tion and answer ses­sion with audi­ence mem­bers. I was a vol­un­teer ush­er at the University of Kentucky’s Singletary Center for many years. The tour came to Singletary and the the hall was near­ly filled not just with young folks, but old­er as well. I remem­ber ask­ing a woman who was attend­ing the event accom­pa­ny­ing her grand­chil­dren what brought her out. She talked of her love for the film and the char­ac­ters and their quirk­i­ness. People were lined up to ask ques­tions and share their love with the par­tic­i­pants of this film.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) rates Napoleon Dynamite at 7.0 of 10. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a Critics Score of 72% and an Audience Score of 74%. In search­ing my Roku device I found it avail­able for free stream­ing on Hulu and Disney+ sites. There is also a copy of the DVD on the shelf at the Clark County Public Library.

Napoleon Dynamite may not be for every­one, but if you like inde­pen­dent films with unusu­al char­ac­ters you may want to give this a watch.  That is often the make up of our cult clas­sics, and this cer­tain­ly fits the bill.

Information for this Reel Classic review was gath­ered from sources includ­ing the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb), Rotten Tomatoes, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and Wikipedia.