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Movie Review: “Rocket Science”
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
In the balcony of a school auditorium a boy and girl are necking. A silent and fundamental form of communication. Below them, a crowd pays rapt attention to the verbal fireworks of a high school debate team demonstrating communication at one of its highest and most refined levels.
Fourteen-year-old Hal Hefner (Reece Daniel Thompson) both of these forms of communication might as well be rocket science. In writer/director Jeffrey Blitz’s expressively poignant new comedy, “Rocket Science,” he presents another side of the world of words and the world of young people that he brilliantly essayed in the award-winning documentary, Spellbound, about a spelling bee competition.
For “Rocket Science” he gets more personal and more precise about the effect the lack of words and the lack of social skills has on a young man. Hal does not have the luxury of fading completely into the academic and extracurricular woodwork. While a lot of students choose the back row when it comes to participating and engaging with their regimented and exposed world, Hal can only hide for so long.
Hal is both invisible and a sore thumb, because Hal stutters. Blitz carefully makes Hal an object of sympathy; someone to root for. As dysfunctional as Hal may seem, his struggles are not entirely of his own making. Hal’s Plainsboro, New Jersey, home is experiencing the turmoil of parental disaffection. Mom and Dad have split; she’s moved an obnoxious man and his son into the house; and Hal’s older brother Earl (Vincent Piazza) is picking on Hal at every turn.
Life is about to get a bit brighter when out of the blue and the chaos of a school bus, a dazzling girl pays attention to him. Virginia Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) is Plainsboro High’s ace debater. She collects trophies like other girls collect Barbies or boys. Targeting Hal with laser intensity, she makes him an offer she won’t let him refuse: join the debate team.
Ginny has “intuited” a talent in Hal he would just as soon not be asked to express. After all, he can barely tell the cafeteria worker at school that he wants the pizza, not the fish. How is he going to string more than two fractured words together to argue in the affirmative for abstinence, the topic of the team’s next policy debate?
While Hal would dearly love to move out of his own condition of other-imposed chronic abstinence, he doesn’t have a clue how. He only knows that he would love to be more than Ginny’s debate partner.
How Hal deals with the myriad “blocks” in his struggle to make sense of his world and the people in it is sometimes painful to watch. But, Hal never comes across as a quitter; even though he does retreat to the janitor’s closet on occasion.
Hal fights, often against inadequate adult counsel, to accept his limitations and to express his self-worth. That journey, with its absurd touches, is acutely insightful and life-affirming. A Picturehouse Films/HBO Films production, rated R for language and sexual material.
