Gentlemen Broncos ( 2009 )

Starring: Michael Angarano, John Baker, Robin Ballard, Steve Berg, & Jemaine Clement

Directed By Jared Hess

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1161418/



Jared Hess is a vexing talent.  It's clear that the director-cowriter of "Napoleon Dynamite," "Nacho Libre" and the new "Gentlemen Broncos" is a born filmmaker in the sense that he can compose scenes and sequences, command the frame and flow, see things in his own way and then render them to an audience.  It's also clear that his taste for the jejune and outre limits him and that his desire to seek edges and break rules force him into corners and self-satisfied oddity.

It's tempting to read Hess into the protagonist of "Broncos," young, shy Benjamin (Michael Angarano), a home-schooled Utah boy whose widowed mother (Jennifer Coolidge) designs ghastly clothes and has no idea how difficult her idiosyncrisies have made life for her son.  Benjamin writes sci-fi novels and aspires to the stature of Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement), a legendary (and egoistical) author and illustrator of epic fantasy series.  Benjamin attends a writing seminar at which Chevalier will be a judge and meets an unlikely pair of local entrepreneurs who make films out of unpublished manuscripts.  He winds up with his newest work, "Yeast Lords," shamelessly coopted by his hero and his new friends and his only allies being his daffy mom and her new beau (Mike White).

Inside this load-o-quirk, Hess stuffs three re-enactments of "Yeast Lords": the one in Benjamin's head, the one in Chevalier's head, and the film-within-the-film made by Benjamin's new friends.  They're all needlessly daffy (Sam Rockwell plays over the top in two of them, to give you the gist) and Hess amps up the oddity of the so-called 'real world' of the film as if trying to balance out these warped fantasies.  It's a desperate game of one-upmanship with himself, and it wears you out -- and not with laughter.

There are pleasures in the film.  Clement ("Flight of the Concords") makes a wonderfully pompous presence, crossing James Mason, the young Orson Welles and Dr. Evil, and Hess's compositional and editing skills haven't deserted him (the opening credits sequence -- a series of mock paperback covers -- is brilliant).  But as the struggle toward something new and different overwhelms the film, it becomes less and less human, less and less funny and less and less worth the effort to meet it on its own terms.  Hess is an auteur, yes, but even auteurs need little angels on their shoulders telling them when enough is enough.

Overall Review ( * * )

Mr. What?