MOVIE REVIEW: 'Rocket Science'


From today's Oregonian....




Hal Hefner is stuck in hell. And in New Jersey.

Hal (Reece Thompson) is a smart and perceptive high-schooler -- but thanks to his bullying brother (Vincent Piazza) and a debilitating stutter, he's paralyzed by neuroses and panic attacks. His father recently left his mother. His mother then shacked up with a judge (Steve Park) with a horrifying sense of humor. And Hal gets terrible advice from everyone -- including a school counselor (Maury Ginsberg) with the barest understanding of speech pathology who advises Hal to "go back to where you were before you tried to exceed expectations."

But Hal's real journey into hell begins when he joins the Plainsboro High debate team because of a woman. Specifically, he joins the team because of Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) -- a master debater who talks faster than Maude Lebowski and warms Hal's heart with (a) her girl-next-door loveliness and (b) her persuasive arguments that she sees hidden talents in Hal.

"I'm ferreting you," she tells him. "Deformed people are the best. Maybe it’s because they have deep reserves of anger."

What follows is "Rocket Science," a dry, vicious, and deeply moving little comedy that sort of takes the structure of a teen sports movie, then undermines that structure at every turn.

Thompson is phenomenal as a smart, funny kid who can barely speak -- driven to drink and stalking and revenge and experiments with accents and sing-talking as he blunders through a world full of "kids wielding words like weapons and brandishing ideas like axes."

Writer/director Jeffrey Blitz (director of episodes of "The Office" and the documentary "Spellbound") has an incredible ear for dialogue and the mechanics of debate, and he gets wonderfully offbeat performances out of everyone. "Rocket Science" is a spiritual cousin of comedy-dramas like "Rushmore" and "Election" and "The Squid and the Whale," and it uses the form of the sports movie to challenge notions of victory. Hal "ups his game" over the course of the movie, as Ginny puts it at one point. But does he become a "winner" in any conventional sense? And does that matter?

This is a frequently ribald teen comedy, the sort of movie where one kid talks about his father being "the Kama Sutra Barry Bonds" -- but it's also a powerful, funny film about the cost of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone when you don't quite know who you are. Hal's heroic journey recalls Rilke's poem "The Man Watching": "This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, / by constantly greater beings."
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A-minus; 98 minutes; rated R for some sexual content and language.

'Rocket Science' (The Oregonian, Aug. 17, 2007)

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Posted: Fri - August 17, 2007 at 08:54 AM        

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