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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
GENTLEMEN BRONCOS Gentleman Broncos, Jared Hess’ follow up to Napoleon Dynamite—let us forget, as we ought, the abortive Jack Black vehicle Nacho Libre—opens with one of the best credit sequences I’ve seen recently: a clever montage of sci-fi paperback covers from the ’60s and ’70s. You know the type: yellowing, remaindered cheapies with garish paintings featuring lonely centaurs on barren moonscapes or psychedelic space creatures playing flutes. But unfortunately, nothing in Broncos, a low-key, watchable Dynamite retread, has half so much charm as one of those silly images. In Broncos, homeschooled sci-fi nerdling Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano) attends a weekend writing workshop where he gets to meet his hero, Dr. Richard Chevalier, a self-absorbed British author wryly turned out by Jemaine Clement (one half of the New Zealand duo in The Flight of the Conchords). Everything about Chevalier bespeaks misguided self-satisfaction, from the earbud he always wears, to his turtleneck-cum-leather jacket combo, and his way of speaking in drawn-out syllables. As played by Clement, he’s the movie’s only real bright spot. At the conference, Benjamin submits his manuscript, The Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years, in a contest with Chevalier judging. But Chevalier, whose career is on the rocks, decides to make some light alterations and then pass it off as his own. As with Dynamite, Broncos adorns a rather thin tale by peopling it with a weird Utah populace. Like the Coen brothers, Hess loves ordinary human oddity, and his casting director deserves credit for filling extras and secondary roles with the sort of average, unusual folks you rarely see on screen. But while the Coens get a kick out of stubborn, obese office ladies, Hess likes vaguely white trash sorts. Benjamin’s “guardian angel” from church, played by Mike White, is actually a pretty good comic creation, a lanky hick sporting Jesus hair, who carries a python and exists in a perpetually stupefied silence. And Hess has a sharp eye for little details, such as the ill-fitting stone-washed jeans everyone seems to wear and the Native American knickknacks in Chevalier’s house—just the stuff you’d find in the home of a self-absorbed nincompoop. But despite the
well-chosen bric-a-brac, Broncos generally falls flat. Interwoven
sequences from Benjamin’s sci-fi novel are especially dull. A rather tame
and overstuffed ‘60s space opera parody, it mistakes busy weirdness for
wit and irrelevantly includes the Cyclops from Krull, flying
animatronic stags, and an unrecognizable but game Sam Rockwell. And
since Hess is committed to his own brand of homespun wholesomeness, the
most daring jokes we get involve Rockwell’s projectile vomiting and
the losing of his “nads.”
One almost imagines that Hess was speaking for the film when, at one
point, he has Chevalier say, “Leniency, always leniency.”
Brendon Nafziger
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