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Rating: 4 stars

All movies seen on 02/18/2008

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Rocket Science (2007)

Directed by Jeffrey Blitz

Comedy | Drama

Most recently watched by lolareels

Overview

Hal is a 15-year-old high-school student with a minor yet socially alienating (and painful) disability: he stutters uncontrollably. Determined to work through the problem, Hal opts for an extreme route – he joins the school debating team, which sends him on a headfirst plunge into breakneck speech competitions and offers a much-needed boost toward correcting the problem.

Rated R | Length 101 minutes

Actors

Nicholas D'Agosto | Margo Martindale | Reece Thompson | Anna Kendrick | Jonah Hill | Denis O'Hare | Vincent Piazza | Aaron Yoo | Utkarsh Ambudkar | Candace Scholz | Lisbeth Bartlett | Virginia House | Marilyn Yoblick | Maury Ginsberg | Emily Ginnona | Dionne Audain | Dan De Luca | Michael Kusnir | Steve Park | John Patrick Barry | Josh Kay | Jane Beard | Herb Merrick | Carol Florence | Betsy Hogg | Brandon Thane Wilson | David DeBoy | Andrew Collie | Susan Duvall | Elisabeth Noone | Jeanette Brox | Roland Gomez | Lee R. Sellars | Joel Garland | Dan Cashman

Viewing History (seen 1 time)

Viewing Notes

This originally appeared as a DVD review for PopSyndicate.com in 2008.

Sometimes small victories are the best victories.

Writer and director Jeffrey Blitz takes on a subject in Rocket Science that hits close to home for me: stuttering. As characters go, stutterers are usually left out the cold for more flamboyant problems, acted wholly without realism, or they just serve as pure jokes. Thankfully, Rocket Science is none of those.

Rocket Science is the story of Hal Hefner, a young highschooler who wants one thing: to be able to order a piece of pizza. It’s a task that sounds easy, but for Hal it’s a battle because he stutters and it’s a battle he’s losing. Around him his family is falling apart and the only moral support he gets is from his school therapist who has no clue how to really treat stuttering, until the day when a girl named Ginny stops Hal’s kleptomaniac brother Earl from tormenting him and tells him he’s destined for the school debate team. Ginny is a debate wiz, and is determined to mold Hal because her Debate Jesus and partner, Ben, fell apart at the state championship. Ginny’s attention is a first for Hal and he falls head first into love, but she doesn’t feel the same. Whether it’s part of her master plan to win or because she just wants to run, Ginny transfers to a local prep school and takes over their debate team, leaving Hal to fend for himself. Hal falls apart, quits the team, and obsesses to the point of throwing a cello through Ginny’s window. Months pass and Hal’s obsession becomes revenge in the only way he knows how: in debate. His plan takes the shape of Ben, who dropped out and moved away; Ben reluctantly agrees and the two team up to take Ginny down, although Hal learns that revenge isn’t easy.

Being related to a person who stutters, Rocket Science hits close to home and I was afraid that Hal would be unrealistic, because stutters aren’t something that can just be laid down on the page for any actor to pick up. But, Reece Thompson is a natural stutterer, as weird as that reads; his speech patterns feel authentic and he carries an undercurrent of sadness that only adds weight to the performance. Anna Kendrick turns in a wonderfully fiery Ginny that offsets the sadness with palpable confidence, while the rest of the cast usher in tasty, but quirky performances. Blitz crafted a luscious story, but it feels as if he felt he had to spice it up with a bevy of funky characters to get people to like his script; most of the oddball characters are unnecessary or complete throwaways like Jonah Hill’s philosopher. These characters distract from the story and while they bring in a measure of levity, they also pull you right out of the story. What pulls you back, though, is Blitz’s talent for realizing that grandiose plans can often go completely awry, even on the silver screen, and we mark life by the small victories and the smaller moments.

Quirk is a meme running rampant on the indie circuit. Whether it’s the extremes of Napoleon Dynamite, the time-misplaced Juno, the compulsives of Thumbsucker, or this film, they all look and feel like siblings: the setting, decor and technology are relatively timeless, all of the characters are off in some way to varying extremes and there is a concerted effort to avoid the cliche, which Blitz pointedly notes in the slim DVD extras. Yes, it serves to point out the flaws of so-called normalcy, but at what point does avoiding the cliche become cliche?

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