Chuck & Buck
USA 2000
Reviewed by Edward Lawrenson
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Buck lives in California with his mother. When she dies, Buck's estranged boyhood friend Chuck arrives at the funeral with his fiancée Carlyn. When Buck grabs Chuck's crotch, Chuck leaves. Buck moves to Los Angeles and begins stalking Chuck. He writes a play, called Hank and Frank, based on their friendship, to be staged in the theatre near Chuck's office. Visiting Chuck's house, Buck suggests he and Chuck indulge in the sex games they used to play when they were kids. Chuck refuses and tells Buck to leave him alone.
Buck befriends Sam, the actor performing Hank (the play's equivalent of Chuck). After drinking in his place, Buck makes a move on Sam, who rejects him. Chuck reluctantly accompanies Carlyn to the only performance of Hank and Frank; after watching the play, Carlyn storms off. Buck tells Chuck that he will leave him alone if they have sex one last time. Chuck acquiesces. Buck moves in opposite Sam, who has forgiven him. Later, he is invited to Chuck and Carlyn's wedding.
Review
In this, Miguel Arteta's second feature, the title character Buck writes a play, a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his childhood friendship with Chuck, now a bigshot in the music industry. Beverly, the theatre manager hired to direct the play, doesn't quite know what to make of it. "It's like a homoerotic misogynistic love story," she hazards.
Watching Chuck & Buck, you recognise her bewilderment. Buck, played by the film's writer Mike White, is an oddball, a 27-year-old man-child who sucks on lollipops, still plays with toy cars and blunders into situations, blithely unaware of the adult tensions underlying them. In one sense, Buck's childlike take on things cuts through the frippery of Chuck's LA life: at a party Chuck is having for his record-industry colleagues, Buck shoots dead any attempt at smalltalk; later he admires Buck's place "I like your house... it's kind of old personey." The use of a child or childlike protagonist to puncture the pretensions of adulthood is common enough in contemporary Hollywood (from Big to Forrest Gump), but what makes Chuck & Buck so fresh is that it pushes the logic of this device to absurd degrees. Buck's attempts to reignite his friendship with Chuck are funny (like Mike Leigh, Arteta, whose first film Star Maps was unreleased in the UK, knows how to turn embarrassment into laughs) but there's also something sad, if not dysfunctional about Buck's refusal to let go of his childish ways.
The film takes on a darker, more unsettling edge when it becomes clear that Buck's attachment to Chuck stems from the sex games they used to play when they were 11 years old - "Suck and fuck" as Buck remembers one of them. At first, you're not sure whether to trust Buck's recollections: shot, like the rest of the film, on digital video, his flashbacks have a desaturated, over-exposed quality to them, like memories half imagined, as insubstantial as the misty wisps that billow from Buck's humidifier. But once Chuck, in a brilliantly played, disquieting scene, confirms what happened between them as boys, the film is on difficult uncertain ground: in questioning the standard notion that children of that age are wholly desexualised, Arteta does a spot of taboo-breaking which iconoclastic philosopher Michel Foucault could be proud of - and it's certainly a long way from the saccharine depictions of childhood Hollywood tends to favour. But in making light comedy out of the premise, Arteta soft pedals the way these two men might have been affected by participating in such precocious sexual experiments; worse still, in poking fun at the idea that Buck still fancies Chuck, the director seems to connect Buck's homosexuality - he is also taken with macho-man Mike, who acts (ineptly) in his play - to his arrested development, as if his gay crushes were a further sign of emotional immaturity. But just as Beverly's damning description of Buck's play doesn't quite do the beguilingly amateurish performance justice, the sour note struck here by the film is sugared by Arteta's many graceful and delicate touches. For all its rebarbative moments, Chuck & Buck is a film which you can't quite get a fix on: it's a movie about child sex which is also as airy and sweetly likeable as anything you'll see this year. What makes it such strange viewing is that it's hard to tell whether this is a sign of Arteta's achievement as a film-maker or his failing.
Credits
- Director
- Miguel Arteta
- Producer
- Matthew Greenfield
- Screenplay
- Mike White
- Director of Photography
- Chuy Chávez
- Editor
- Jeff Betancourt
- Production Designer
- Renée Davenport
- Music/Music Supervision
- Joey Waronker
- Tony Maxwell
- Smokey Hormel
- ©Miguel Arteta/Matthew Greenfield & Blow Up Pictures, LLC
- Production Companies
- Artisan Entertainment & Blow Up Pictures present
- a Flan De Coco film
- Executive Producers
- Jason Kliot
- Joana Vicente
- Co-executive Producers
- Thomas Brown
- Charles J. Rusbasan
- Judith Zarin
- Michael Escott
- Co-producers
- Scott M. Cort
- Beth Colt
- Associate Producers
- Gina Kwon
- Jason Zolov
- Jocelyn Jansons
- Abby Schwarzwalder
- Production Supervisor
- Alberto Gieco
- Production Manager
- Wendy Riseborough
- Post-production Supervisor
- Alberto Garcia
- Additional Post Supervisor
- Steven Kaminsky
- Assistant Director
- Jennifer Schmidt
- Casting
- Consultants:
- Meredith Tucker
- Miranda Thompson
- Associate:
- Nina-Marie Gardner
- Additonal Editor
- Pam Martin
- Set Decorator
- Isabelle Stamper
- Costume Designer
- Elaine Montalvo
- Costume Design Consultant
- Jeanne Yang
- Key Make-up/Hair
- Jane Nan Kelly
- Title Design
- Andy Goldman
- Theme Song
- Gwendolyn Stafford
- Additional Vocals
- Petra Haden
- Music Consultants
- Margaret Yen
- Peter Afterman
- Jessica Clements
- Soundtrack
- "Freedom of the Heart" - Gwendolyn Sanford, Smokey Hormel, Joey Waronker; "Look Both Ways before You Cross" - Petra Haden; "It's Kind of Complicated" - Stephen Thomas Cavit, Jim Knodle; "Nwo-tew" - Josh Mancell; "Air a danser", "Paul's Dance", "Prelude and Yodel", "Nothing Really Blue" - Penguin Café Orchestra; "Eye Protection" - Ralph Carney; "A World of Joy and Harmony" - Tony Maxwell; "Horny" - Tracy and the
- Hindenberg Ground Crew; "Astral Plane" - Modern Lovers; "The Last Stand, Still" - Stephen Thomas Cavit; "Gorgeous" - Girl Next Door; "V'adoro Pupille" - Amanda Tan; "Bittersweet"
- Sound Design
- Ann Scibelli
- Sound Mixer
- Yehuda Maayan
- Re-recording Mixers
- Ken Teaney
- Mark Rozett
- Marshall Garlington
- Re-recording Engineer
- Michael A. Morongell
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Andrew DeCristofaro
- Dialogue Editors
- John C. Stuver
- Claire Freeman
- Nancy Nugent
- Sound Effects Editors
- Jeff K. Brunello
- Adam Gillick
- ADR
- Recordist:
- Shawn Kennelly
- Mixer:
- Eric Thompson
- Foley
- Artists:
- Sean Rowe
- Joan Rowe
- Mixer:
- Eric Thompson
- Cast
- Mike White
- Buck O'Brien
- Chris Weitz
- Charlie 'Chuck' Sitter
- Lupe Ontiveros
- Beverly
- Beth Colt
- Carlyn
- Paul Weitz
- Sam
- Maya Rudolph
- Jamila
- Mary Wigmore
- Diane
- Paul Sand
- Barry
- Gino Buccola
- Tommy
- Annette Murphy
- Tommy's mom
- Glory Simon
- witch
- Doug Kieffer
- Mark
- Jonathan Brown
- Jake
- Ruthie Bram
- Doirothy
- Giovanni Gieco
- Scarecrow
- T.J. Wilkins
- Ezra Pugh
- Erin Espinoza
- Megan McCaw
- theatre kids
- Linda Lichter
- bank teller
- Meredith Tucker
- Jolie
- Zak Penn
- Josh Weintraub
- Tony Maxwell
- Vince Duffy
- themselves
- Dana Baratta
- Melissa Booth
- Pamela Gordon
- Buck's mom
- Josephina J. Rocha
- Pilar
- Jesse Lee Thomas
- young Chuck [photos]
- Caleb Wilson
- young Chuck [film]
- Nathaniel Olderman
- young Buck
- Chuy Chávez
- Adam Storms Parker
- Paul Gelfman
- James Mooney
- Damon Huss
- Jamie Hook
- actors
- Miranda Thompson
- cocktail waitress
- Ron Yerxa
- minister
- Yehuda Maayan
- man at wedding
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Metrodome Distribution Ltd
- 8,603 feet
- 95 minutes 36 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour