In late 2004, soon after its release, I took my older daughter, Juliette, who was twelve at the time, and one of her friends to see “Napoleon Dynamite.” I hadn’t been following the reviews closely and just had the vague notion that it was a teen movie a little different from the others. It was a delight for us all, but one aspect of it left me with a nagging question. It was a teen movie in which pop culture plays absolutely no role; I had the impression that the cultural life of these high-school kids in an unnamed rural town had been rigorously, deliberately, and systematically removed from their story. Thinking about the chaste doings on-screen (no kissing, no cursing), I figured that the unexpressed context had to be religious.
A little research revealed that the director, Jared Hess, and his wife, Jerusha Hess, who co-wrote the script with him, are Mormon, as is the movie’s star, Jon Heder. It turned out that the town where the movie was shot, Preston, Idaho, was founded as a Mormon settlement and is predominantly Mormon today, and that, according to Hess, the film is largely autobiographical. When the DVD came out, in 2006, I reviewed it for the magazine, and referred to the story’s religious context. I also wondered whether Hess’s next movie would address his religious ideas more explicitly; my editors encouraged me to cut that speculation from the review, and I agreed that it’s better to stay out of the forecasting business. Imagine my delight when, a month later, “Nacho Libre” came out: it is, as I discuss in the clip below, one of the strangest and most personal American movies ever made about religion. (I’m happy to report that Hess’s new movie, “Gentlemen Broncos,” is scheduled for release on October 30th.)