It's primarily a matter of how the characters are presented, as I saw it. Arthur Miller had made a point of making Willy into a character who had not accomplished anything in his life, who could even be said to be below the everyman at the end of the day. At the same time, we as the audience are meant to sympathize with him, to empathize with his plight even if we think his head is stuck in the clouds. I could be alone in this, but when I look at Napoleon Dynamite, I see the directors trying to pull off something similar with the principle cast. Consider for a minute their character traits. For the most part they are without true virtues, at best coming off as average in a few categories and accomplishing little of note throughout the course of the movie and we are given little reason to care about those things they do accomplish.Angryman101 said:
As I acknowledged in the first post I very likely overanalyzed it, but I simply couldn't see a point behind presenting the protagonists like that unless they had a specific goal in mind, and - in that regard - attempting to capture the 'pathetic hero' essentially invented by Death of a Salesman seemed the most likely intent, making the film's greatest failure (as I saw it) its inability to understand how to present and use such characters. Hence my comment that it felt like they tried to capture the essence of Death of a Salesman without understanding it. I saw it as a failed attempt to mimic the core features of Miller's production.
