Rocket Science
Director: Jeffrey Blitz. Screenplay: Jeffrey Blitz. Cinematography: Jo Willems. Film editing: Yana Gorskaya. Production design: Rick Butler. Producers: Effie Brown, Sean Welch. With: Reece Daniel Thompson, Anna Kendrick, Vincent Piazza, Nicholas D’Agosto, Margo Martindale, Aaron Yoo, Josh Kay, Steve Park, Maury Ginsberg, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Denis O’Hare, Dan Cashman, Lisbeth Bartlett, Emily Ginnona, Michael Kusnir, Jane Beard, Jonah Hill, Betsy Hogg, Brandon Thane Wilson, David DeBoy, Roland Branford Gomez, Carol A. Florence. USA. 99 min. 2007.
I like “Napoleon Dynamite” a lot, but I never expected it to become such an influential movie, inspiring such imitators as the enervating “Eagle vs Shark” and now the first narrative feature from Jeffrey Blitz, a specialist in public-school ethnography who directed the spelling-bee documentary “Spellbound” in 2002.
Set in middle-of-nowhere New Jersey but filmed in the Washington, D.C. area, the geek-friendly story centers on the amusingly named Hal Hefner, a congenital nerd who can’t believe his good fortune when one of the school’s smartest girls recruits him for the debating team, explaining that her intuition detects great argumentative talent beneath his stuttering, stammering exterior. Deciding to give it a shot, Hal shows up for practice and barely manages to say his name, much less convince anybody of anything. But he’s a game little guy, and before long he’s trying all sort of gimmicks—speaking with an accent, whispering and singing instead of talking—in a good-faith effort to sound confident, make the debating team, and even less likely, get to third base with the not unattractive girl who enlisted him. By the final scene he’s discovered her hidden agenda, signed on a high-school dropout as his debating partner, had multiple fights with his Neanderthal big brother, and watched his mother ditch two men in a row, one of whom is his dad.
Blitz borrows more than one trick from “Napoleon Dynamite,” including a zero-degree emotional tone and heavy use of dazed, quizzical, or downright blank reaction shots. What freshness the picture has comes mainly from Reece Daniel Thompson’s acting, which seems so real that it’s tempting to suspect he’s not acting at all. He is, of course—born in 1988, he’s racked up a striking assortment of TV credits since his 1999 debut—but he inhabits the movie so completely that it’s hard to imagine how Blitz could have filmed it without him. First-class work also comes from Anna Kendrick as the smart girl, Margo Martindale as a debating coach, Aaron Yoo as a Korean-American boy amusingly named Heston, and Steve Park as his dad, a small-claims judge who finds every day a new and hilarious adventure. This is no “Napoleon Dynamite,” but it’s low-key fun (very, very low key) in its own artfully pallid way. – David Sterritt
