Napoleon Dynamite wouldn't fit in well anywhere, but at least he'd find some kindred souls in "The Guatemalan Handshake."
An understated, surrealist comedy that is more successful at being weird than funny, the film seeks to capture the "Napoleon Dynamite"-influenced tone of bizarre small-town quirkiness. It falls short of the mark, but not by much.
"The Guatemalan Handshake," winner of a special jury prize at the Slamdance Film Festival, is writer/director Todd Rohal's first feature film after directing four shorts.
In place of a singular main plot, there is a swirl of nutty side stories involving odd, bored characters looking forward to a demolition derby.
An existentialist 10-year-old girl, Turkeylegs (Katy Haywood), serves as the narrator, who ruminates over the disappearance of her best friend, Donald (Will Oldham). Turkeylegs pops in now and again, but she's really just a side character. The closest thing the film has to a main protagonist is Sadie (Sheila Scullin), a young pregnant woman who's been kicked out of the house by her domineering, demolition-derby-champion father. Sadie is forbidden to compete in the derby, but she isn't about to let that stop her.
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The winding road also includes a mysterious power outage, a dangerous band of Boy Scouts, an old woman searching for a dog, and a roller-skating-rink manager who takes his job far too seriously. All the while, we keep seeing a dorky orange mini-car that resembles the one Steve Urkel drove in the sitcom "Family Matters."
Rohal plays with style and visuals as he ties his characters and situations together in a loose web connected more by shared silliness than any cohesive core. The film plays as though he emptied out a bunch of old notebooks filled with short-subject ideas and lumped them together in order to display his talents.
"The Guatemalan Handshake" is not quite Saturday-morning-matinee material, but it's the exact sort of offbeat, refreshing find that festival trollers are on the lookout for. It may not quite be "Napoleon Dynamite," but it's definitely a film Napoleon would watch. As would Steve Urkel.
review
The Guatemalan Handshake
**1/2
Rated: Not rated
Cast: Katy Haywood, Ken Byrnes, Will Oldham, Sheila Scullin
Director: Todd Rohal
Family call: It's pretty tame — fine for family viewing.
Running time: 96 minutes
Screening: As part of the Arizona International Film Festival, at 7 p.m. today at Crossroads and 5 p.m. Friday at the Screening Room. For ticket, venue and schedule information for the festival, visit www.azmac.org/ festival/index.htm online.
