Napoleon Dynamite Cost $400,000 and Made $46 Million. It's Still a Mood, Not a Movie

Let me first say what's true, so nobody in Idaho writes me a letter. Napoleon Dynamite was made for about $400,000 by Jared Hess, who wrote it with his wife, Jerusha, and grew it from a short film. It premiered at Sundance in January 2004, was bought by Fox Searchlight, and went on to make about $46 million worldwide. That's a return of more than a hundred to one. You can't get that in the stock market, unless you know something you shouldn't.

So it was a success, and a deserved one, and Jon Heder's performance is a real piece of work. The flat voice, the moon boots, the slow shuffle of a boy who believes in himself for no reason anyone can see. It's a great character.

My complaint is that it's a great character in search of a movie. The plot, such as it is, involves an election for class president, a llama, a time machine bought off the internet, and an uncle who won't stop talking about 1982. It's not a story. It's a scrapbook. Each scene is funny the way a photograph of a strange relative is funny, and then you turn the page, and there's another relative.

What people loved was the mood: the quiet, the pauses, the beige. And people quoted it for about three years, all of them at once, at every party, which is how a joke that was funny in a theater becomes a joke you hear from a coworker while you're trying to microwave soup. A film that is mostly remembered as lines on a T-shirt has, in a sense, been turned into a T-shirt.

In fairness, it's sweet, it's odd, and the dance at the end earns its cheers. But a movie should go somewhere, even if it's only to the next town. Napoleon Dynamite stays home, draws a picture of a liger, and waits for you to call that a plot. It's a lovely afternoon. I'm just not sure it's a film.