Film Review: Rocket Science (2007)

Screenwriting that is.

Okay, okay. Nobody's going to build a functional moon rocket in his backyard the way a scribe can sit in her basement and pen the next great American screenplay, but Jeffrey Blitz' script for the 2007 independent sleeper "Rocket Science" perfectly illustrates how easy it is to miscalibrate a hundred-some pages of action and dialogue.

Blitz, who also directed the film, first made waves with his 2002 documentary "Spellbound" which garnered an Oscar nomination for its utterly mesmerizing foray into the world of the national spelling bee.

And like "Spellbound", "Rocket Science" takes viewers into the dog-eat-dog arena of competitive academics. High school debate. The film opens with the mid-speech freeze-up of New Jersey's preeminent high school debater, Ben Wekselbaum. On the heels of his failure, Ben experiences a Salingeresque disappearance from the realm which makes him great. This launches an effort by Wekselbaum's bitter debate partner, Ginny Ryerson, to recruit a stuttering wallflower, Hal Hefner, as Wekselbaum's replacement.

Hal, despite his intelligence, is an obvious poor choice for the debate team. But Ginny, through her well-honed powers of persuasion convinces him that his mind is born of the rhetorician's womb. This turns out to be a wonderful angle from which to pursue this setting, especially when Ginny's overall motives manifest, which, for the sake of spoilage, I won't go into.

But there are problems with the overall execution.

First, Blitz' script has a very dry wit. This often works for the main character who uses sarcasm to compete with the easy articulation that surrounds him. But there is layer upon layer of caustic dialogue throughout the script, much of which is undeniably clever, but doesn't often inspire laughs. The viewer becomes quickly aware of these layers and, by midway, one gets a feeling of being piled upon. Blitz may have been better-served by taking inventory of all his high-brow (and occasionally wacky) banter, pick his favorites and then reign back about fifty percent of it. The effect of so much repartee was having one extremely interesting character, Hal, as the seeming Grand Marshall of a parade of eccentric side characters. Some worked -- Jonah Hill's cameo as the junior philosopher got many laughs. Some didn't. Ginny's bra-obssessed neighbor, for one. And Michael Yanagita for another.

"Rocket Science's" verbal assault may have been forgiven if Blitz hadn't then lead the audience down the path of least resistance. One way to look at the plot development here is that Blitz eschews normal expectations by going anti-Hollywood ending. Hal does not pull a "Karate Kid" moment and "win it all" despite overwhelming odds. Nor does he even aim low and pull a small idiosyncratic victory ala Napoleon Dynamite's dance at the end of his namesake epic. Hal does succeed on a personal level culminating in the finest moment in the entire film, a private conversation between him and his Dad. And that sort of ending is fine. Except that Blitz avoids the moment that could have made his film something truly special.

Hal didn't have to win the debate. Ginny didn't need her comeuppance. But we did need to see Hal find his voice. And I don't mean literally. In Hal's stroke of genius of hunting down Wekselbaum, he has to convince this shamed champion to get back in the game. To take down Ginny on principal. And he does. Sort of. But we don't hear it. Instead we see Hal and Ben converse as they walk through the ungentrified urban ruins of Trenton, New Jersey. Wekselbaum essentially convinces himself of what Hal came to do.

But this was Hal's crane kick moment. The stutterer versus the debate king. And Blitz flinched, giving us long shots of a scene we needed to hear, the moment that Hal's mind could no longer be hemmed in by his speech deficiency. The falling action after this is a series of MacGuffins in which Blitz could have taken us down the path to a pat Hollywood ending but, to his credit, avoids. Unfortunately with the cop-out in the Trenton scenes, Blitz leaves us with a bit of a climax-less movie. Yes, there is one, but it's made a little too underwhelmingly.

"Rocket Science" is a good movie. There is much to admire about it. Blitz is a skilled director, coaxing fine performances out of his ensemble, even if a few of the characters land on the obnoxious side. One knit-picky observation is the use of Violent Femmes covers through the cello and piano of a pair of middle-aged fuddy-duddies. With Neil LaBute and Will Ferrell doing variations of the same thing in different venues ten years ago, the joke seems to have played itself out. Effectively, this ongoing theme is a musical embodiment of a good many quips in "Rocket Science". The kind that are easy to spot if you get the reference, but not particularly funny.

Blitz' skill here is a testament to his obvious talent in the documentary arena. Not everybody can transition from there to narrative so easily. Look at "Canadian Bacon" for proof of that. But he'll need to get past some scripting tentativeness. One wonders what a no-holds-barred scribe like Diablo Cody might have done with the Trenton scenes. Blitz is reportedly going back to documentaries for his next project. But if he does decide to take another stab at narratives, just a little recalibration could launch his film into the stratosphere.