Don Verdean Is to Laughs What the Dead Sea Is to Water

There's terrific comic potential in the idea at the heart of Don Verdean , the latest shrug of a film from Jared and Jerusha Hess, the husband-wife writer-director team behind Napoleon Dynamite , Nacho Libre and one that for good reason you haven't seen, Gentlemen Broncos . That premise is priceless, and, like Indy himself, you'll probably want — after seeing what the Hesses do with it — to snatch it away and turn it over to the experts. The Hesses do to it pretty much what Raiders' Nazis had planned for the Ark of the Covenant: They make it into a bomb. It's generous to call their films hit-and-miss, as that implies that the Hesses try, really, to make a gag hit. Here, as always, they seem more engaged with curious, meaningless details than with character or jokes. You might not know, by the end, whether Sam Rockwell's archaeologist truly believes the nonsense he sells on his low-rent book tour, or whether he's actually as cruelly dismissive of his lovestruck assistant, Carol (Amy Ryan), as he seems. But you will know that when he drinks milk he winds up wearing it on his mustache.



Rockwell is charmless in a role that seems to be written that way. Verdean is a pious stiff who gets in over his head, vowing to prove the veracity of scripture by turning up ancient evidence of Bible stories — and then choosing to fake that evidence the second his quest turns difficult. That's played as a decent man's mistake rather than a con man's hustle or a fool's foolishness. Verdean is impassive, a little dumb, disengaged from everyone around him, given to silent Bible-reading even when at lunch with Carol. Even his faith remains a stubborn, simple given, neither celebrated, satirized, nor even examined. He is, in short, a terrible lead for a farce, a shut-off blank we neither laugh at nor feel for. (Ryan, for her part, finds the heart of her churchy single-mom character, but the movie gives her no help