2007, New Zealand
Comedy, Drama, Romance
Ignorance is bliss and love is blind, so when a shark and eagle find each other it is meant to be.
Lily (Loren Horsley) is a painfully shy Meaty Boy cashier, terribly smitten with appliance store hack Jarrod (Jemaine Clement of "Flight of the Conchords"). When he invites her more attractive co-worker to a dress-as-your-favorite-animal party, she takes advantage of the situation and arrives herself. After impressing him with her mad video game skills, they fall into awkward geek love with all of the trappings of tweenager social skills.
Director Taika Cohen guides the kiwi actors in his first feature length film, focusing on the absurd but drawing out tortured souls. Sweet and eager Lily finds comfort in her brother’s weak jokes after the two were orphaned as children. Jarrod overcompensates in all he does in a desperate attempt to impress his father, who still mourns the death of Jarrod’s far more successful brother.
Building off of these fragilities, both seek the better life just out of reach. However, as Lily attacks this goal optimistically, Jarrod childishly attempts to remake the past in his brother’s image. After a series of taunting prank phone calls, he challenges his high school bully to a fighting match to finally even the score. Training much as his brother did for real competitions, he constantly glances over his shoulder for a glimpse of pride from his father.
This tale of redemption is enveloped in nerdy quirkiness. In the vein of Napoleon Dynamite, reality has no hold on their goofball actions. Jarrod tries to impress her with homemade candles and pathetic martial arts and party games include tossing shoes through a friend’s hoop helmet. His family tries to sell her everything from discontinued track suits to questionably safe make up.
With her hair pulled to the side like so many messy school photographs, Lily screws up her mouth as she gains courage to say the words she has practiced in the mirror. Her softly sung “You are apples, I am tangerines” haunts the film as stop motion apple cores that were tossed by the two lovers wander in parallel to their biters.
Though the characters are of mature enough age to have sex and children, they often seem to be acting out junior high politics. Honesty is a rare quality and hyperbole runs rampant on Jarrod’s side of the dialogue. Apparently Lily views the better man beneath the nonsense, because there’s really no other explanation for her crush. She shrugs her shoulders and agrees to each of his suggestions, looking up to him with doe eyes as if he were the captain of the football team.
Cohen and company make a hearty effort to attain comedy in the land of super geekdom, but they do not succeed as effortlessly as Napoleon. The film is properly quirky and odd, but the sweat on their brow shows when it should feel more seamless. Though an enjoyable romp, hopefully Cohen will raise the stakes in his next effort.