I have followed the careers of Jared and Jerusha Hess for a decade now. In 2004, they released their first film, Napoleon Dynamite, and at the time, I was teaching English in a small rural town in southern Idaho. So the movie's depiction of the weird yet mundane goings-on of a small, rural southern Idaho town seemed a lot more like a documentary to me than the silly fictional film it was.The film was co-written by the husband and wife team and directed by Jared. It was filmed in Hess's hometown of Preston, Idaho and was a poster child for early 21 century light-hearted cinematic quirk. You may remember the "Vote for Pedro" t shirts hipsters sported for a few years after the movie. You may also remember that Napoleon himself, the actor Jon Heder, briefly had a career playing various versions of Dynamite's clueless savant character in movies such as Blades of Glory, The Benchwarmers, and Just Like Heaven.
Napoleon Dynamite was a small independent production Hess made shortly after graduating film school at Brigham Young University. The film was made for about 400, 000 dollars but ended up grossing over 46 million.
After a profit success like that, the Hess team could pretty much write their own ticket. Unfortunately, they suffered something of a sophomore slump with the Jack Black vehicle, the 2006 film Nacho Libre. Like Napoleon, Nacho Libre centered on an outsider who is simultaneously enthusiastic and clueless. In this case, it was Jack Black as Nacho, the hapless monk-in-training at a Mexican monastery who secretly wants to be a luchador, an over-the-top masked professional wrestler. The film had a bigger budget, a smaller profit margin, and not nearly the charm or critical success the Hess's first film earned.
I have to admit that, though Nacho Libre was uneven and hamstrung by Jack Black being Jack Black, I kind of love it. It's a happily absurd movie with unexpectedly lovely cinematography that you wouldn't expect from a Mexican wrestler movie that features fart jokes.
If Nacho Libre was a sophomore slump, the Hess's third film, 2009's Gentlemen Broncos, was a junior catastrophe. Airless, bleak, profoundly unfunny, and pointlessly surreal, it disappeared from theaters faster than you can say M. Night Shyamalan and ended up in the five dollar bin at Wal-Mart. The film has a few champions who argue it's a misunderstood classic about the dangers involved in pursuing the artistic life. But those champions are wrong. It's a bad movie. The Hess's not only owe me the five bucks I shelled out, but for the 89 minutes of my life I can never have back.
Following that failure, the Hess team regrouped and headed back to familiar territory, producing an animated t.v. series version of Napoleon Dynamite. This was another project that failed to find an audience and was canceled after one season. But, like Nacho Libre, I loved it. My kids still quote lines from certain episodes and we wish futilely that it would come back.
All this history brings me to Austenland, the 2013 film that was co-written and, for the first time, directed by Jerusha Hess. It was adapted from the Shannon Hale novel of the same name and produced by Stephanie Meyer of Twilight fame. The film stars Keri Russel as Jane Hayes, a sad, lonely 30-something who is obsessed by the characters and world of Jane Austen. Feeling her life is empty as it is, Jane sinks her life savings into a trip to Austenland, the titular British resort where enthusiasts can live in the Regency-era world of Jane Austen for two weeks. Naturally, fish-out-of-water hijinks ensue.
Unfortunately, Austenland isn't any good. It leans more toward Gentlemen Broncos' annoying surrealism and away from the idiosyncratic but still very present warmth of Napoleon Dynamite or even Nacho Libre. The film's problem is that it can't decide what it wants to be. At one moment, it seems to be ruthlessly mocking the type of person who might actually pay money to attend the Jane Austen equivalent of fantasy camp, but in the very next moment the movie asks us to take Jane Hayes' emotional journey seriously. In poetry, it's called a tonal fault - when some line or reference suddenly takes the reader far away from the original tone of the poem. Think of the Normandy Beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan culminating in a dance number or Ron Burgundy showing up as Sandra Bullock's space-induced hallucination in Gravity. It just wouldn't work, right? Well, so it is with Austenland, except it seems to want to be both Unforgiven and Blazing Saddles. It wants to be a self-aware but serious example of genre while simultaneously mocking that genre.
It points out the ridiculousness of the cliched tropes of romantic comedies but then turns around and leans on them like a crutch. Wallflower protagonist discovering her own power and beauty while transforming from plain jane to attractive and powerful center of attention? Check. Dramatic confession of love just as someone's about to board a plane? Check. Girl ends up with the guy who seemed totally wrong but only turns out to be so totally right?! Check!The movie's treatment of these cliches doesn't really do anything with them. It seems to say, "Isn't it funny that movies and Jane Austen novels always use stuff like that? We thought we'd try it."
The film never congeals into anything that makes sense. There are a few moments of laughter, but they're mostly stunned, confused, "what in the world is this movie trying to do to me" laughs. Jennifer Coolidge seems to be in an entirely different movie and her jarring performance is good for a couple of laughs, but it's more like she's the drunk person who wandered onstage in the middle of a performance.
One other disappointment is the cinematography. For all the sumptuous scenery around Austenland's stately property, the whole thing looks as though it was filmed on one hazy day at noon. Everything looks washed out and pedestrian instead of rich and lovely like it's supposed to.
Jared and Jerusha Hess have yet to make anything that's as original and fun as their first film. Hollywood keeps giving them chances, but despite their different approaches, nothing has really been as successful. I'll keep watching their careers and rooting for their success, but another movie like Austenland will make me a lot more hesitant about spending my time watching their work - even if it is in the five dollar bin at Wal Mart.
