CHUCK & BUCK (Artisan) Starring: Mike White, Chris Weitz, Lupe Ontiveros, Beth Colt, Paul Weitz. Screenplay: Mike White. Producer: Paul Greenfield. Director: Miguel Arteta. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes, sexual situations) Running Time: 95 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
RAIN MAN was not about Dustin Hoffman's Raymond Babbitt. There are some who find the film overly sentimental, and others who consider Hoffman's Oscar-winning performance little more than a gimmick, but it's hard to argue that the basic structure of the story wasn't what it had to be. Tom Cruise's Charlie Babbitt was the central character, the person who grew and changed. Raymond couldn't be that character, because it's absurd to build a narrative around the idea that someone with a profound emotional/psychological condition can decide through a simple act of will to be better.
This lesson is offered to explain why CHUCK & BUCK, for all the quirky things it does right, is ultimately an experience somewhere between improbable and downright insulting. The troubled hero of our story is Buck O'Brien (Mike White, who also wrote the script), a man living in about as arrested a state of adolescence as you could imagine. Buck has never lived away from home, never been to college, never even held a job. He is therefore left adrift when his mother dies, and tries to fill the void by tracking down his childhood friend Charlie Sitter (Chris Weitz), known to him as Chuck back in the day. Charlie has moved on to a life as recording industry executive in Los Angeles with a beautiful fiancee named Carlyn (Beth Colt), but Buck just wants to play the way they did 15 years ago. And he's determined to recapture that friendship, even if it means moving to Los Angeles and stalking Charlie to do it.
There's a lot of interesting stuff built into the premise, including a not-particularly-twisty twist that still generates a bit more interest in the Chuck/Buck dynamic. White's performance as Buck is pitched just right, somewhere between endearing and creepy in his striped T-shirt and perpetually Blow-Pop-stuffed grin. Director Miguel Arteta's choice of digital video seems an ill-advised one dramatically -- why heighten the immediacy and realism of a story centered around somebody's fantasy world? -- but the technology and hand-held movement are rarely distracting. Throw in an infectiously innocuous theme song to set the tone, and you've got the raw material for some solid whacked-out drama and dark comedy.
And that raw material is left to rot. CHUCK & BUCK could have been turned into a wonderfully grim tale of go-getter Charlie having to deal with childhood events he's tried to forget being thrust back into his face. But Charlie is a huge sucking black hole of a characterization, left utterly bereft of personality or motivations in Chris Weitz's performance and White's script. He's merely a target of obsession, carelessly created because White never intends for the story to be about anything but Buck. When that story turns to Buck's introspection about his life, and actions he begins taking when he faces some hard truths, it's enough to make a jaw drop in disbelief. CHUCK & BUCK's resolution is centered around the idea that 15 years of juvenile infantilism are as easy to toss off as a striped T-shirt.
CHUCK & BUCK's saving grace is a sub-plot that ultimately has little to do with the ostensibly main plot -- Buck's attempt to mount a production of a play he has written about his childhood friendship, called HANK & FRANK. There's some wonderful interaction between White and Lupe Ontiveros (superb as a children's theater house manager given her first chance to direct), and some funny stuff from Paul Weitz (Chris's brother, playing the incompetent actor Buck chooses for "Hank" for his resemblance to Charlie). A short film entirely about the play within the play might have been great fun, unburdened by the need for grand third-act shifts of character. CHUCK & BUCK sinks thanks to a fundamental misunderstanding of how to structure a plot with a plausible character arc. It's like Raymond and Charlie Babbitt walking into the sunset arm in arm, after Raymond decides he just doesn't want to be autistic any more.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 child therapies: 5.
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