If we politely ignore Nacho Libre, this movie is the true spiritual follow-up to Napoleon Dynamite for Jared Hess, and it accordingly suffers from sequelitis.Told in the same sweetly halting and awkward universe as ND, Gentlemen Broncos follows the travails of home-schooled teenager Benjamin (Michael Angarano) as he attempts to get his sci-fi scribblings published. At a convention for young writers, bestselling author Maurice Chevalier (Jemaine Clement) steals Benjamin’s Yeast Lords manuscript and puts it out as one of his own. Meanwhile, sexually aggressive (in a Mormon way) Tabatha (Halley Feiffer) and her video director sidekick Lonnie (the marvellously-lipped Hector Jimenez) are adapting Yeast Lords for the silver screen in a way that doesn’t exactly accord with the author’s wishes. This set-up actually yields plenty of comic material, and some of the performers, notably Clement and Jennifer Coolidge (who was born to live in Hess’s world of the pathetically tentative fringe) rise to the occasion. But unlike ND, which provided preternaturally sweet supporting characters for Napoleon (Pedro and Deb), this movie strands us with no character who can elicit sympathy. There are plenty of characters to pity, but none to cheer for. Angarano is particularly blank as the protagonist, gazing at every scene in the movie with a frozen expression of nervous worry, so that all the comedy has a surface of pudding to bounce off. Feiffer, a Noah Baumbach regular, brings the most interesting character interpretation to the table, but she’s more of a misguided villain than a salvation for Benjamin. In the end, he nominally triumphs, but there’s nothing like the transcendent dance sequence from ND, and since this is a sequel in all but name, the omission is glaring. If you’re going to watch this, watch it solely for Sam Rockwell’s kooky Texan performance as the main character of Yeast Lords in several cable access–worthy re-enactment scenes.
Leave a Reply