Eagle vs. Shark
Watching "Eagle vs Shark" is like sitting next to a terminally awkward first date at a restaurant. You cringe and feel protective toward the poor, sweet dweebs at the same time.
The first feature by the New Zealand writer-director Taika Waititi has been compared -- over-compared -- to "Napoleon Dynamite ," which is just shorthand for saying it's a deadpan indie comedy about misfits. Waititi's a gentler filmmaker than Jared Hess , though, and at heart a romantic; the DNA of "Eagle vs Shark" actually comes from a long line of fools-in-love movies: "Benny & Joon, "Harold and Maude ," "Turner & Hooch" (kidding).
So its heroine, Lily, is a basket case: a shy fast-food waitress played by the aptly-named Loren Horsley with lank hair, immense blue eyes, and a curiously tilted smile like a /. An orphan, she lives with her kindhearted, eccentric brother (Joel Tobeck ) and yearns for a life like the normals. She knows they hold her in contempt but assumes that's her fault.
"Eagle vs Shark" is about how Lily meets and falls in love with a man even more emotionally arrested than she is: Jarrod (Jemaine Clement ), almost handsome, wholly geeky. He invites her better-looking co-worker to a come-as-your-favorite-animal party; Lily crashes, dressed as a shark with soft felt teeth. She impresses him with her video-game skills (a hilarious, expertly timed sequence), which leads to a sex scene the film graciously averts its gaze from, wandering up the bedroom wall, over and down in time for the near-instant afterglow.
The movie's much like that camera move: angular but forgiving. Waititi lays on the quirk with a trowel -- can we have a moratorium, please, on '70s aviator glasses as a signifier of High Dorkishness? -- but he's more interested in human connection than attitude. (That this delicate film has the same R-rating as Eli Roth's "Hostel: Part II ," by the way, is both a mystery and a crime.) Once Lily travels with Jarrod back to his tiny hometown, the film hunkers down as she decides whether to mature and, more to the point, whether to wait for him to catch up.
The subject is moving on, which Jarrod's family hasn't. His wheelchair-bound father (Brian Sergent ) still mourns the death of a brilliant son (played in family photos by the director himself), while Jarrod is obsessed with a comic mission of revenge against a former high school tormentor. In every way, he's still living in the prison of high school, back when we were all social rejects: lusting stupidly after his brother's girl- friend (Gentiane Lupi ), snapping at his smug sister (Rachel House ), and roundly ignoring Lily. For once, she realizes that's not her fault.
Waititi lets this unfold with charming tentativeness, leaning on a winsome alt-pop score by the Phoenix Foundation and observing various oddities at the center and fringes of the frame. (What is that concrete sculpture in the kiddie pool out back? We never get a good look, and maybe that's just as well.) "Eagle vs Shark" floats by on a mood of concerned and puckish good will, hoping Jarrod will notice that Lily's growing a spine but prepared to drop him like a stone if he doesn't.
Every so often, the movie cuts away to ditsy papier-mâché animations of humanoid apples, representing the couple's journey toward self-respect (or the compost heap, I'm not sure which). These begin as an annoying affectation, but by film's end are as good a metaphor as any for Lily and Jarrod's pilgrim's progress. "Eagle vs Shark" is so hesitant it just about evaporates off the screen, but Waititi has a vision as skewed, and as welcoming, as his heroine's grin.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
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