Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 9:03 pm 
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"A teenage boy with a horrific stuttering problem joins his high-school debate team in an ill-fated effort to win the girl of his dreams. "
-- publicity blurb.


A Sundance film, this has been described as a combination of Thumsucker, Art School Confidential, and Napoleon Dynamite. Also mentioned are The Squid and the Whale for the focus on adolescent sexual obsession and Zach Braff's Garden State for the New Jersey coming-of-age setting. Election has been referred to as the classic forerunner. The reason for all these associations is that this first fiction effort by Jeffrey Blitz, the director of the highly successful Spellbound (a documentary about a national spelling competition and its quirky top competitors), is in a familiar genre and struggles to distinguish itself from other versions. It's not as definitive a statement as Election; it's people aren't as appealing as Thumsucker's, or as ludicrous as Napoleon Dynamite's. The parents aren't skewered as sharply as The Squid and the Whale's. Art School Confidential was a flop and Garden State was a bore, so we can disregard them. Young Hal Hefner (talented Canadian actor Reece Thompson) has a worse problem than thumbsucking: an erratic stutter that makes him tongue-tied under pressure, though at other times he can communicate to various degrees.

That's the most persistent thing Hal struggles with, but there are plenty of others. His parents are breaking up. His older brother (Vincent Piazza) is a bully who attacks him in the shower and an OCD kleptomaniac to boot. His crap school counselor can't help him: "it's a shame you're not hyperactive," he quips. And Ginny (Anna Kendrick), the high school champion debater, is using him in a peculiar way. Why has she asked him to be her partner on the team, the year after they've lost the New Jersey State High School Policy Debate Championships because of a breakdown on the part of the awesome, but now disgraced dropout, Ben Wekselbaum (Nicholas D'Agosto)? The reason she gives is that she senses intense competitive instincts in Hal: "deformed people have a hidden source of anger," she says. One thing you can say about this movie: it's smart, its characters are clever, and the dialogue is witty and sometimes surprising. That doesn't make it altogether work, but it makes it watchable; besides, the actors are all pretty good, and Reece Thompson is an appealing actor. He's borderline goodlooking, but, intentionally on the part of the director, who had to do two exhaustive searches to find him, he isn't sexy and buff like all the young actors in California. He's from Vancouver.

It turns out that writer/director Blitz himself stuttered, and was on the debate team and they won. But that isn't how it happens in Rocket Science. Maybe Blitz didn't think anybody would believe it if it did. But it's even harder to believe Hal's persistence when at every trial he can't get a sentence out, while Ginny can summarize an eight-minute argument in ten seconds. This story seems to be about persistence, but it's also about too many other things: first love, parents splitting, sibling problems, overcoming a handicap. One point is clearly made: being a teenager is hell for a boy, especially if he stutters. But maybe stuttering is just a metaphor for being a teenager. Maybe that's what thumbsucking was in Thumbsucker. Only Justin in Thumbsucker became a star of the debating team, and that was more fun.

This movie is made for the kind of audience that gets it (and enjoys doing so) when a boy urges Hal to join the philosophy club and then reassures him that Hegel is not included. There's a soundtrack of odd songs with downbeat lyrics (notably by the Violent Femmes) that are often spot on and appealing. Disturbia's cool and edgy Aaron Yoo does a surprising reversal as Hal's proper, nerdy friend and competitor Heston. Hal describes Ben as a "god" who (as a dropout) is "doing drycleaning," and he is convincingly godlike and brilliant in his brief turn as the returning team member. The plot falters here, because Ben and Hal enter competition without school approval. How could that be? Come to think of it, why doesn't Hal overcome his stutter, the way we want him to--at least a little bit? His presenting the resolution in the debate to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic at Ben's suggestion, because stutters can be overcome while singing, is pretty far fetched. The whole movie is a string of ornate whimsy. Perhaps so were those other films, especially Napoleon Dynamite. But they hang together a bit better. Still, I liked Hal: rarely has a handicapped character been made so appealing and human -- in an ironic high school coming-of-age flick, anyway.

Part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2007, Rocket Science will open in theaters in California June 1st.

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