Rocket Science Review
Posted by Jacob Ziegler on 08.10.2007
Jeffrey Blitz's long-awaited follow-up...
ROCKET SCIENCE
/// August 10, 2007
Hal Hefner: Reece Daniel Thompson
Ginny: Anna Kendrick
Ben Wekselbaum: Nicholas D’Agosto
Earl Hefner: Vincent Piazza
Coach Lumbly: Margo Martindale
Heston: Aaron Yoo
Lewis: Josh Kay
Juliet Hefner: Lisbeth Bartlett
Judge Pete: Stephen Park
Lewinsky: Maury Ginsberg
Ram: Utkarsh Ambudkar
Doyle Hefner: Denis O’Hare
Picturehouse presents a film written and directed by Jeffrey Blitz. Running time: 98 minutes. Rated R for some sexual content and language.
BY JACOB ZIEGLER
The opening moments of “Rocket Science” took me back to a place with which I am very familiar. It’s the world of High School Policy Debate, which I was a part of during all four years of my high school career. The screenplay by Jeffrey Blitz accurately captures the bizarreness that is Policy Debate.
That’s not all Blitz captures. He proved with his prior film, the Oscar-nominated documentary “Spellbound,” he has an innate ability to capture the minds of young people. The fact that he has done it with both real children in a documentary and now with fictional characters is a tremendous achievement.
Blitz’s main character is Hal Hefner, played with pitch-perfect awkwardness by eighteen-year-old Reece Daniel Thompson. Hal has problems that are not uncommon in the land of teenage films – his parents are divorced, his older brother and bullies at school pick on him, he’s nervous around girls, and he stutters. It’s this last trait that defines Hal and Blitz never takes any cheap shots at it. Hal is a sympathetic character by nature, but Thompson never overplays his handicap or turns it into something unbelievable.
The other main character, although he gets way less screen time, is Ben Wekselbaum, played by Nicholas D’Agosto. It took me the entire movie to figure out that D’Agosto played one of the main Tracy Flick sympathizers in Alexander Payne’s “Election,” so I tell you this so that you won’t have to be annoyed by not remembering who he is for as long as I did. As the film opens, he is in the middle of the state championship round. His partner Ginny (Anna Kendrick) is convinced that there is no option less than winning, and she will go to great lengths to do so; but more on her later.
Midway through his penultimate speech, Ben freezes. They lose the round because of him, and Ben drops out of school to work at a Dry Cleaner in Trenton. At the same time, all the way across Jersey, Hal’s parents are splitting up, and his father is moving out. These events are seemingly not connected, though the narrator assures us that they are. And we should trust the narrator, he’s omnivorous.
Hal goes to speech therapy, but since his therapist’s specialty is hyper-activity, Hal doesn’t get any better. The only thing that seems to improve his speech (not to mention his confidence) is when Ginny approaches him to be on the debate team. One may wonder what a championship caliber debater would want with a stuttering rookie as her partner, and the screenplay reveals it in pieces, never just throwing out extraneous information just for the sake of it.
Thompson totally carries the movie with a stunning performance that never hits a false note. Kendrick holds up her end of the bargain too, and I suspect that anyone who has ever been in debate will have known someone like her Ginny. A well-placed cameo by Jonah Hill (who will be appearing in “Superbad” next weekend) actually gives the film a little more credibility, and ads some hilarious moments.
This is Blitz’s first feature film; just as “Spellbound” was his first documentary film. The fact that I can’t decide what I’d rather see him do more speaks to his effectiveness as a story teller no matter the genre.
The 411: Winner of Best Fiction Film at the Traverse City Film Festival, “Rocket Science” is another winner from Jeffrey Blitz. Reece Daniel Thompson and Anna Kendrick accurately portray the pratfalls of teenage life, and do so without a hint of tongue-in-cheek. “Rocket Science” is honest, funny, and just an all-around terrific movie.
