Writer-director Jared Hess had a massive cult hit with Napoleon Dynamite in 2004, and now comes back with Nacho Libre, the story of a Mexican monk who takes up wrestling to finance extra foodstuffs for the orphanage where he’s the cook.
This tale may seem like pure invention of the Hollywood “high concept” sort, but it is in fact based on the real-life story of a Mexican monk who became a wrestler — except that he didn’t have to keep it a secret, as Brother Ignacio (a gurning Jack Black) does in the movie. The real monk openly wrestled for decades in the character of Friar Tempest, and even celebrated Mass with his wrestler’s mask on. But that wouldn’t have worked in the film because much of the comedy is based on Ignacio having to keep his moonlighting job hidden from the others in his monastery. Odd how the filmmakers had to make the church more conservative for the sake of the movie.
The kind of wrestling we’re talking about here is lucha libre or free fighting — a kind of spectacular, no-holds-barred battle that makes the World Wrestling Federation pantomime we see on TV seem as formalised as a 16th-century gavotte. On the evidence provided in the movie, lucha libre is a staple form of popular entertainment in Mexico — or at least it was in the vaguely Fifties-style world Nacho Libre presents.
Ignacio dons a home-made wrestling suit, cloak and mask to become Nacho the wrestler and, with the assistance of his second, Esqueleto (Héctor Jiménez), takes on all comers. Usually he loses, or they lose (because Esqueleto frequently enters the free-for-all), but the pair still earns enough money to buy some fresh food for the orphans — and to impress Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera), the orphanage’s beautiful new Penélope-Cruzalike nun.
Esqueleto means skeleton in Spanish, and he’s a sharp contrast to the pudgy Ignacio. Black makes much of his round, hairless physique to generate comedy — this is a species of fat joke that runs all the way through the movie. We’re meant to titter at his titties. Certainly, not since Spartacus has a pair of man-boobs worked so hard to help define a character. Apart from Black/Ignacio, this fat-humour rears up once more in the form of a large woman with the hots for the scrawny Esqueleto. She gets abused and humiliated for her trouble. Hilarious.
The other ongoing joke is the range of appalling Mexican-Spanish accents we hear. Sometimes the pronunciation is so self-consciously odd as to be amusing, but mostly, I suspect, it’s just a racist white-American reaction to find any bumbling Hispanic speech funny — in the same way white South Africans used to tell jokes about black people and mimic their accents. Hawu, medem! My sides are splitting.
So much for the humour, or the attempts at it. The situations themselves aren’t really funny, and there is no narrative tension because all the clichés of sitcom and redemption have to be cycled through. There are at least no overt fart jokes, though there do seem to be a lot of fart noises on the soundtrack — popped in whenever possible to up the laugh count? The people doing the sound effects must have really taken to that challenge with gusto.
This kind of comedy, it would appear, is not built out of actual jokes (let alone wit) but simply exists in a world of absurd unreality that is supposed to be funny in its own right — a suburb of Hollywood, perhaps, called Sillyland. It may just be me, cantankerous old cynic that I am, who found Nacho Libre almost entirely chuckle-free. But I did see it with an audience of 15 or so others, and during the screening there was barely a titter to be heard.