One of the Most Original Movies About Religion Ever Made

“Gentlemen Broncos” (which I discuss in this clip) is the third feature directed by Jared Hess. I’ve written here before about the religious inspiration of his movies, which was apparent from the very first of them, “Napoleon Dynamite.” His second, “Nacho Libre,” set in a convent and depicting a passionately chaste relationship between a monk and a nun—and drawing a link between Christian sacrifice and the wrestler’s endurance—made the connection both explicit and joyous. “Gentlemen Broncos” is an even more ecstatic and personal exploration—in loopy, gross-out comic form—of the essence of faith in cosmic religious vision itself, and the ease with which those visions can be perverted to worldly ends. I still remember my astonishment, while watching the movie in a nearly-empty screening room with the few other critics who took the trouble to attend, a few days before its release, and thinking—as I still do, after seeing it again—that it is, simply, one of the most original movies about religion ever made. The fact that it was hardly released, hardly reviewed, hardly discussed—and that Hess’s movie-making career seems, as a result, to have stalled—makes it all the more important to revisit it on DVD. At a time when another, altogether more sombre and grandiose action film, “Prometheus,” puts forth an earnest mythology of faith, it’s worthwhile to compare its proud and self-important bombast with the self-deprecating, self-humbling, yet steadfast joy and the spare, innocent wonder of Hess’s cinematic vision.