Disabilities at the Multiplex: Rocket Science

Disabilities at the Multiplex
with Stephen Snart

Rocket Science


Starring Reece Daniel Thompson, Anna Kendrick, Nicholas D’Agosto, Vincent Piazza and Denis O’Hare
Written and Directed by Jeffrey Blitz
Distributor: Picturehouse Entertainment
Release Date: August 10 (select cities)
Running Time: 100 Minutes

Quirky coming of age tales are a dime a dozen in the world of American independent cinema, but Rocket Science – the story of a stuttering high school student who decides to join the debate team – is worthy of singling out from the rest of the crowd. Feature film neophyte Reece Daniel Thompson plays the lead role of Hal Hefner, a shy teenager who knows all the answers in his English class but dares not raise his hand because of his debilitating stutter. His visits to the school’s special education teacher – who’s only been trained to deal with hyperactivity – prove largely unfruitful. At lunchtime, no matter how often he rehearses: “I’d like the pizza,” when stared down by the lunch lady he finds himself unable to formulate the words and gets dealt with a congealed piece of unidentifiable fish.

His stutter isn’t any better at home, an area just as unstable and unwelcoming as the high school halls. His negligent, solipsistic mother (Lisbeth Bartlett) drove his exasperated father (Denis O’Hare) out during his early teenage years and his kleptomaniac older brother Earl (Vincent Piazza) is fond of berating Hal at any chance. But Earl’s not completely sinister; his anger is suggested to be an expression of the social torment of high school he is feeling himself.

No doubt inspired by the work of Wes Anderson, the film comes equipped with an anonymous narrator who chimes in from time to time. He sets the stage in the film’s opening scene in which we see bowtie clad motor mouth Ben (Nicholas D’Agosto) effortlessly spewing out a carefully constructed speech at the New Jersey State Debate Challenge. The omniscient narrator clues us in that this seemingly innocuous moment in which the top debater suddenly loses his gift of gab will turn out to be one of cosmic interconnectedness for Hal. Inexplicably silenced, Ben is shamed in front of the whole debating community and slinks off into obscurity.

Ben’s former debate partner and girlfriend, the self-assured Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick), is determined to win the next year’s contest despite the setback and thus ferrets out Hal to be her next partner. She’s undeterred by his severe case of stuttering, convinced he has the right kind of brain for the job.
Rocket Science’s remarkable charm is routed in its ability to combine a light and breezy tone with an acute awareness of the caustic realities of adolescence. The film doesn’t offer any fairy tale endings or unrealistic solutions to problems like marriage crisis, teen angst or speech impediments; instead it embraces the harshness of real world truisms while presenting them as obstacles that can be dealt with, if not necessarily overcome.

The humor of Rocket Science is biting but not cruel. Unlike the nasty Napoleon Dynamite (another Sundance success) which ridiculed its lead character mercilessly because of his implied mental condition, Hal’s disability is never a source of the film’s humor. Sure, Hal is put in a few of predicaments squarely designed by the filmmakers to elicit laughter but the audience is not asked to laugh at Hal because he has a stutter but rather because he is simply a pubescent teenage boy. In contrast, the scenes in which his affliction is most pronounced are filmed with stark sincerity to evoke empathy and not mockery: a preliminary debate scene is filmed from multiple angles while the words that Hal is unable to vocalize materialize behind him on a chalkboard.

Part of the reason Rocket Science succeeds so winningly is the film’s protagonist is genial without being cloy. A large part of this is due to the engaging performance by Thompson, who bears the puppy dog eyes and pronounced nose of Luke Wilson and the nubile charm of Lou Taylor Pucci in Thumbsucker. But not to be unnoticed is writer/director Jeffrey Blitz (director of the acclaimed documentary Spellbound) who carefully constructs the film so that his subject is neither pitied nor valorized. Instead he is regarded as an average teenage boy struggling to find his place in the confusing and treacherous world of adolescence.

(Photo above shows that of a young man, dressed in jacket and tie and holding some papers, standing in front of a classroom. Behind him is a blackboard; there are two students sitting to his right.)

View movie trailer here...