DVDs of Jared Hess’s movie Nacho Libre go on sale this week, which prompts the musing: Is Nacho Libre a Mormon movie?

Now, many people don’t think Hess’s previous movie, Napoleon Dynamite, counts as a Mormon movie. Reasons against it could include:

• It was successful. Further, it was even successful with audiences unaware of any connection to Mormons.
• No one in the movie is explicitly identified as a missionary, bishop, or other church official. Also, neither baptism, administration of the sacrament, nor any other ordinance is depicted.
• “Vote for Pedro, and your wildest dreams will come true” is not found in the Book of Mormon. (On the other hand, Thomas Monson has preached in conference, twice since 2001, in regard to not insurmountable challenges, the inspiring line from the play Shenandoah: “If we don’t try, then we don’t do; and if we don’t do, then why are we here?”)

The way I figure it though, if a couple of BYU alumni write a movie and one of them directs it with an old classmate in the lead role, set and filmed in a town two miles up the road from where Ezra Taft Benson was born and buried, a town that has 4,000 people and eight wards, and there’s ambiguity as to whether it’s a Mormon movie, then there’s apparently nothing particular about Mormons that can be communicated in a movie. Further, what gentile anymore has five younger brothers on whose antics he could to base his scenes? Plus, President Hinckley shaped his latest admonition to the young men around the warning that girls are only interested in guys who have skills.

Going on to Nacho Libre, at first glance it’s about a Catholic monk, so of course it’s not a Mormon movie. A few things about Nacho, however, make him seem a monk imagined by a Mormon. The first is the infatuation of the monks with the beautiful Sister Encarnacion, which appeared inspired by Mormon missionaries anxious for the day they would unlock their hearts more than by experience in any monastery. The second was Nacho’s use of the word “gospel” when he said that he knew a lot about the gospel and when he proposed looking for a fictitious bum so that he and Sister Encarnacion could talk with the bum about the gospel. It sounded to my ears like a Mormon use of the word. A third item that caught my ex-missionary radar was the filthy, half-naked wrestler who believed, not in God, but in science.

The fourth thing was the movie’s overall point of view of the Mexican setting, that of an immersed outsider more than casually acquainted with the poorer parts of a poor town and still finding them notable, the perspective a former missionary to Venezuela would provide. Also, his mission-augmented Spanish language ability would have enhanced working with the Mexican film crew. That’s right: Jared Hess is the next John Huston, but making movies starring Jon Heder or Jack Black instead of Humphrey Bogart.

No, Nacho Libre isn’t going on anyone’s list of Mormon movies, but it is unmistakably the work of a creator who is in turn unmistakably Mormon. A few weeks ago, the Internet Movie Database had Jared Hess listed as the director of a proposed Captain America movie, but that entry is gone now. That would have been something: Steve Rogers, Mormon super soldier.

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One gentile reviewer, Steve Sailer, had thoughts on Napoleon Dynamite as a Mormon product:

At the screening I attended, Hollywood’s Bright Young Mormons were out in force as the theatre resounded with the lovely laughter of wholesome-looking starlets from the Great Basin. The twenty-something crowd found the small town misadventures and eventual triumph of an ornery high school geek (voted “Most Likely to Find Sasquatch”) a cartoonish but redolent delight. This mild, PG-rated film is winning bellylaughs from gentiles under-25 too, so the studio is now rolling it out to 1,200 theatres.
Personally, I didn’t find the movie terribly funny, which made me feel downright wizened to realize that I’m too over-the-hill to get the jokes that are slaying all the Mormon hipsters.

He had a follow up a couple years later with some further interesting observations of the Mormons.

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