Part of Teenage Wasteland
It’s time to dust off those “Vote for Pedro” shirts and embark on an idiosyncratic journey to Idaho in NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, the story of a listless boy on the outskirts of social groups at his high school. After his grandmother is injured in an accident, his life is thrown into further dismay when his raucous uncle Rico shows up to watch after the family. Finding no solace in his home-life either, Napoleon (Jon Heder) pours all of his energy into his new friendship with Pedro (Efren Ramirez) — a morose Hispanic student with a big heart and a thin mustache who decides to run for class president. Together, the dorky duo launch a campaign that just may take the underdogs to the top.
Ushering in a new generation of independent films, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is perhaps the most prominent coming-to-age comedy of the early aughts.
“It's charming. It's hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen.” —Melissa Levine, Dallas Observer (Jun 24, 2004) “[Director Jared] Hess has the low-budget-comedy wastrel deadpan — the one Jarmusch stole from Warhol, and Wes Anderson has made semi-mainstream — down to a science, and his dry pause-and-cut idiosyncrasies are Swiss-timed. But more than anything, the film is an epic, magisterially observed pastiche on all-American geekhood, flooring the competition with a petulant shove.” —Michael Atkinson, Village Voice (Jun 1, 2004) “It's a signal irony that a movie shot for $200,000 by a Mormon couple (director Jared Hess and his wife, Jerusha Hess, also the co-writer) in Idaho opens nationally on the same day as Steven Spielberg's $100 million THE TERMINAL and that NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is every inch the superior product. It's tight, resonant, funny as hell, seriously bent and whacked, and also wonderfully healing.” —Stephen Hunter, Washington Post (Jun 18, 2004)
