Debatable Honesty

[August 15th, 2007]

Rocket Science has the poor fortune to open in Portland the same weekend as Superbad (see story) without actually being Superbad . If this placement is designed as countermarketing—let’s pit the quiet, melancholy high-school movie against the raucous, dirty high-school movie —it’s a mistake, like hosting a Scrabble party across the street from a kegger. Still, there are some people for whom Rocket Science will resonate a great deal more than its competition. If you have spent a period of your life trying to buy beer underage, you will recognize yourself in Superbad . If, however, you have ever locked yourself in a bathroom stall to cry after losing some kind of public-speaking contest, Rocket Science is the rare film that sympathizes. If you have done both, consider yourself the recipient of a well-rounded education.

This is the second movie from director Jeffrey Blitz; his first, the documentary Spellbound , was a humane, intricate examination of the National Spelling Bee. Rocket Science shows the same familiarity with the rituals of adolescent competition, from memorization drills to makeshift podiums. It is a measure of the movie’s earnest tone that the hero’s goal is to join the school debate team, and that this aspiration is never treated as a joke. “The topic that evening was farm subsidies,” a narrator declares over a montage of the debate tournament that sets the plot in motion. “And if you don’t understand how farm subsidies could cause such a commotion, you don’t know life.” Jeffrey Blitz does know life—or at least the kind of intense, socially frustrated kids who mistake farm subsidies for it.

He also knows his Wes Anderson movies. Dan Cashman’s narration sounds suspiciously like Alec Baldwin’s work in The Royal Tenenbaums , while the combination of Jo Willems’ rich cinematography and a soundtrack of Violent Femmes songs hearkens back to Rushmore . Which is unfortunate, because at its best Rocket Science shakes off its influences and offers original perception. The story of Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson), a small New Jersey boy with a haircut like a Beatle and a stutter that barely allows him to spit out a sentence, and his love for the debate team captain, Ginny (Anna Kendrick), is depressing as only high school can be depressing—because it is his initial meeting with failure, before he recognizes the taste.

But the movie is not always at its best. It often shies away from the raw pain of its story into a kind of clever preciousness (stuttering boy! Asian stepdad! musical therapy!) that functions as a kind of twee anesthesia. This is not a problem unique to Rocket Science —it has basically been endemic in American indie cinema for the past decade—but it is particularly disappointing here, because it disguises a story that doesn’t need ironic trimmings. The question that must be debated after Rocket Science is whether in the future Jeffrey Blitz will be the servant of cuteness, or its master.