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Web-Exclusive Review: Gentlemen Broncos

Alternative Press - Tim Karan on 10/28/09 @ 11:04 AM - altpress.com

COMEDY
GENTLEMEN BRONCOS (Fox Searchlight)
STARS > Michael Angarano, Jennifer Coolidge, Jemaine Clement, Mike White, Héctor Jiménez, Halley Feiffer
DIRECTOR > Jared Hess
RATING > 4/5
OPENS > OCT 30

After exploring the high-flying, fat-slapping world of lucha libre in the lackluster Jack Black vehicle Nacho Libre, husband-and-wife filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess have returned to the grab bag of frumpy '80s thrift store leftovers and fatherless high school pushovers that made Napoleon Dynamite one of the most beloved comedies of the past decade. In Gentlemen Broncos, Michael Angarano (Snow Angels, Lords Of Dogtown) plays Benjamin, an aspiring science fiction writer who lives with his dressmaker mother (Jennifer Coolidge, perhaps best known as Stifler's mom from the American Pie movies) in a house that looks like some kind of retro-Mormon biodome. He's written a novel titled Yeast Lords, which he enters in a competition being judged by his hero, prominent sci-fi author Dr. Ronald Chevalier, played to pretentious perfection by Jemaine Clement, the bespectacled half of comic Kiwi troubadours Flight Of The Conchords. What Benjamin doesn't know is that Chevalier is on the ropes with his publisher and desperately needs some new material. Impressed by Yeast Lords, Chevalier claims it as his own, changing only the names of the main characters and the title of the book itself, to The Chronicles Of Brutus And Balzaac.

With the main plot in motion, the Hesses then split the film in two, alternating between Benjamin's real-world struggle with Chevalier and the playfully vulgar space-age fantasy of the novel itself, in both its original and plagiarized forms. In a clever character device that shows off his considerable comedic range, Sam Rockwell plays both incarnations of the futuristic protagonist--a hirsute Southern drawler named Bronco in Benjamin's version (modeled after the author's deceased father) and Brutus, the mincing, platinum-haired mustache queen in Chevalier's rip-off. Meanwhile, Benjamin's new friends Tabatha (Feiffer) and Lonnie (Jiménez, who played Esqueleto in Nacho Libre and does a highly amusing gay-Hispanic-male variation on Amy Sedaris' Strangers With Candy character here) film an ultra-low budget adaptation of Yeast Lords starring a snake-toting blowgun enthusiast played by Mike White (Chuck & Buck).

The Hesses could easily be accused of exhuming the Napoleon Dynamite formula for Gentlemen Broncos--garish clothes and hairstyles circa 1988-'92; earnest, small-town eccentrics; vaguely oppressed high-school protagonists with no reasonable father figures--but that certainly doesn't make either of the films any less appealing. And unlike, say, Wes Anderson's wildly successful string of films concerning the foibles of the well-heeled--all of which owe some degree of debt to Hal Ashby's 1971 classic Harold And Maude--the Hess aesthetic seems to be largely original. How they choose to develop it in the future will be worth following, but in the meantime, Gentlemen Broncos serves as a very funny and very welcome revival. --J. Bennett

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