fun, fun,
fun!
by Douglas Messerli
Mike
White (writer), Miguel Arteta (director) Chuck
& Buck / 2000
The death of actress Lupe Ontiveros
this week led me to again watch the 2000 film, Chuck & Buck, in which she plays the savvy and salty theater
manager and director Beverly Franco, a role very much at the center of this
unusual film. And, although I had already written a brief paragraph or two
about Mike White’s script in my 2007 essay on “The Unordinary Obsessions of
Ordinary Lives,” I felt that the film also fit nicely with the movies about Los
Angeles I have gathered under the rubric of “Rebels without a Home.”
It is, however, difficult to describe the central figure of the film,
Buck O’Brien (Mike White), as a rebel. Perhaps this 27-year-old man who acts
more like a 14-year-old boy might be more likened to a slightly retarded
stalker. But he is most definitely, like many of the figures in my observation
of this growing film “genre,” an outsider, someone who arrives in Los Angeles
without the slightest ability to comprehend and fit into whatever one might
perceive as Angeleno “normality,” and, accordingly, he and the city are a
perfect fit.
Something like that clearly has been the case with Buck, since Chuck
eventually moved away and is at film’s beginning a “normalized” LA heterosexual
record-producing executive, who has shacked up with his girlfriend, Carlyn
(Beth Colt). His kindness of accepting the invitation to funeral of his
childhood friend’s mother is rewarded with an attempt by Buck to continue the
childhood “suck and fuck” games. Like too many stereotyped views of gay
figures, Buck has been clearly a “mamma’s boy” who has refused to grow up, his
childhood toys and music surrounding him (including a song whose major chorus
includes the words “Fun, Fun, Fun’), along with his presumably mother-induced
hypochondriac conditions, one of which demands he sleep with a vaporizer. Buck
is, in short, an absolutely clueless man-child who behaves so strangely that
only his mother could have loved him. Chuck, who has now rechristened himself
Charlie, although sympathetic with the situation of the mother’s death, is
quite obviously shocked and repelled by the Buck’s sexual come-on, and
immediately determines to leave. Carlyn behaves like any civilized and
double-talking adult, inviting Buck to come see them sometime in LA.
The problem is that Buck has had no lessons in social double-talk,
taking them at their word, soon after withdrawing $10,000 from the money left
to him by his mother to make the trip to Los Angeles. After several phone brush-offs, he begins to stalk
his boyhood lover’s office and house, finally pretending to be a delivery boy
to reencounter Charlie, forcing him to an uncomfortable picture opportunity
and, ultimately, getting himself invited to a party at their house, where, in
comically uncomfortable interchanges with Charlie’s sophisticated friends, the
film reveals some insightful comments about the record executive’s current
life:
Party guest: How was he
like in his former life?
Buck: Oh he was fun!
At another moment we find evidence of Charlie’s retreat from a life of
“fun, fun, fun: “Charlie is not a very sentimental guy.” When Buck reveals that
their relationship was very special, one guest comments: “Charlie hasn’t
changed. He’s still very exclusive.”
The intrusion upon his former friend moves Buck even further from any
possibility of communicating with him ever again, polite invitations being
postponed in a way that Angelenos have of distancing themselves from those with
whom they feel they need distancing—an easy disappearing act in a city so vast.
Having failed through direct contact, and having already created the
“hypothetical” possibility through the local theater manager, Beverly, in a
playhouse across the street of Charlie’s office, Buck determines to write a
play that will reveal the truth: that Carlyn is a kind of witch who has come
between the men’s relationship, in the play named Hank and Frank. Hiring
Beverly to direct the play at $25 an hour, renting out the theater for one
night, Buck oversees the casting, insisting that they hire a third rate actor
(as Beverly puts it, “He was the worst thing we saw today”) simply because he,
Sam (Paul Weitz, Chris Weitz’s real-life brother) shares the darkly handsome
look of Charlie.
Eventually Buck even moves in across the hall from Sam’s apartment and,
upon one occasion, attempts to replace Sam with Charlie as a lover. Once again,
Buck is rejected, but Sam, who admits he is himself a little “weird,” forgives
Buck and the two remain friends.
Beverly: I see it as a love story between Hank and
Frank.
Buck: You do?
Beverly: It’s like a
homoerotic misogynistic love story.
Buck: Well, it is what it is.
The important thing for Buck is that he has been able to lure Charlie to
see the play! Charlie’s reaction suggests
the end of any possible further communication.
Yet, White’s ever-shifting script throws another curve ball, as Buck
confronts Chuck once again, this time at a late night dinner meeting with
clients at a bar, making his own “deal,” so to speak, by suggesting that if
Charlie is willing to have sex with him one more time, he will never bother him
again. To our surprise, Charlie accepts, even admitting during their sexual
encounter that he does remember the childhood events:
Buck: Do you
remember me?
Chuck: I remember
everything.
The one-night sexual slip, it is clear,
is never revealed to Charlie’s lover, whom he soon marries. And Buck, with the
now successful Beverly having become the theater’s director, has found a place
in the company in her former job. A chance encounter between Charlie and Carlyn
with Buck at a local restaurant, results in what is merely a gulp of deep
wistfulness on Buck’s part, as he remains in quiet discussions with his theater
peers. He apparently has grown up to be comfortable in his own identity, which,
after all, is what the difficult city offers anyone who lasts it out.
Los Angeles, July 29, 2015
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (July 2015)
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