From the Jul 20 – Jul 26, 2000 issue

Film

Identity Crisis

A "Bad" Filmmaker Makes Real Good

by Jamie Hook

WHEN I WAS in college, I at first wanted to study film, but in the end it proved too expensive: The film studies program not only demanded massive course fees, but asked that students finance their own thesis film to the tune of up to $15,000. Sour grapes, I reasoned--I was only too happy to avoid the vulgar, self-aggrandizing, rich-kids-laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank crowd that congealed around the Wesleyan University Film Studies department. They were just the nastiest collection of people. Smug, witless, conservative, good-looking in the pejorative, they were the type of people for whom film was no more than a glamorous extension of a privileged adolescence. Half of them were sons and daughters of wealthy Hollywood producers to begin with, and many of them have gone on to play their hands well in the building meretriciousness of American film: Zak Penn and Adam Leff blithely, if unwittingly, aggravated the ascendancy of the fatuous blockbuster with their Last Action Hero; Joss Whedon brought television back down to its knees with Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Paul Weitz managed to re-trench the teen sex comedy with the stupefying American Pie; and I'm sure I don't need to remind you of the willful atrocities committed by Michael Bay. With hindsight, I see so clearly that Film Studies was an idiots' parade.

There was one person I held an affinity for, though. Miguel Arteta seemed a good chap, demure but silly and sincere. His senior thesis bore out that assessment: Amid a sea of dense, overproduced crap on the most trite subjects (one 35mm production, rumored to have cost over $25,000, was about a rich kid hanging out in Hollywood with his friends and a gun and blah, blah, blah), Miguel's film was a soufflé. Where others had made macho urban genre films, Miguel had made a musical titled Every Day Is a Beautiful Day, about a town where everyone can sing--except, of course, our hero. It was a great film: light and funny, tuneful and dancing, smart and honest. I found myself excited and inspired and looking forward to whatever he would do next. Which, as it so happens, was one of the worst films of the '90s.

Star Maps, Miguel's debut feature, was a plateful of simpleminded, unoriginal, risible excrement set down as the centerpiece at the banquet of 1990s independent film, ruining the party for everyone. Insipid, derivative, trying too fucking hard, Star Maps was further dragged down by a glowing, moronic press stubbornly insisting that the film was excellent, original, subversive, and artistic. (I am happy to report that The Stranger, ever the bastion of contrarian thought, wisely and modestly proclaimed the film to be "the most overrated piece of crap I've ever seen.")

Overblown and underambitious, Star Maps represented just about everything that had gone rotten in American independent film by the late '90s. It was a sad moment when I saw the film and gave up on Miguel. And, as it turns out, it was entirely my loss. Miguel's new film, Chuck & Buck, more than repays the debt incurred by Star Maps. A worthy centerpiece at the current banquet of independent film, Chuck & Buck is an excellent, original, subversive, and artistic film.

Shot in blurry, bleached-out digital video and sporting an excellent cast of non-professional actors, Chuck & Buck is an American fairy tale about obsession, repression, lust, and loyalty. Written by and starring the boyish, bird-faced Mike White (another Wesleyan don), the film examines the creeping maturity of Buck, a stunted man-child whose mother dies at the film's opening. Inviting his childhood friend to the funeral, Buck tries desperately to reconnect with Chuck (Chris Weitz)--who now goes by Charlie--in a desperate and perverse bathroom encounter. Spurned and chastised, Buck nevertheless sees the possibility of a rekindled relationship with Chuck, and so follows him to Los Angeles to begin an obsessive, haunted pursuit of his once best buddy.

The details of his pursuit comprise the bulk of the film, with Buck at first pursuing Chuck directly from work to home to parties to dinners--i.e., stalking him--and later, writing him a florid valentine in the form of a strange surrealist drama, Hank and Frank, which seems to recast their childhood in a mythical Eden that is then interrupted by an evil witch. This play is conveniently rehearsed and performed across the street from the corporate offices of Chuck's high-powered record label, to which Buck pays numerous visits to ensure his obsession will attend the one-night-only premiere.

Along the way, both Chuck and Buck's developing lives are fleshed out with some excellent supporting characters. The underrated and underused character actress Lupe Ontiveros (El Norte, As Good as It Gets) is especially energetic as the fast-talking, mercenary Beverly, stage manager of the theater where Buck stages his opus. Slowly growing maternal in her relationship with Buck, Beverly provides us with a precious angle on his character, unsympathetic at first, yet slowly growing to understand her man-child. Hollywood talent manager Beth Colt also gives a delicate show as Chuck's fiancée, Carlyn. Her plastic exterior slowly gives way to an atypically deep and thoughtful well of understanding as she deals with her boyfriend's strange appendage with sanguine affect, uncynically urging a reconciliation between the two even as it becomes obvious that there are deeper secrets between them. Paul Weitz, brother of Chris Weitz and director of American Pie, also adds a nice dimension to the film as one of the leads in Buck's passion play, and later, Chuck's strained doppelgänger.

But it is the strange, convoluted, aggressive relationship between Buck and Chuck that is the core of the film. White's Buck is a fantastic, uniquely American creation. A tarnished, almost unlikeable variation of the wide-eyed innocent, Buck comes off as a neural net of adolescent desires, saturated with the simplistic yearnings of those raised on television and comic-book humanity. White fills Buck's world with sweet food and drink--his favorite cocktail is a rum and coke, his favorite snack a Blow Pop (get it?)--and surrounds him, from his clothes to his furniture, in garish, pastel colors, the hues of junior high.

And yet, quite unlike the anemic Hollywood simpletons of recent memory--Rain Man's Raymond Babbit, Forrest Gump, any of Kevin Costner's roles--Buck is far from simplistic. Compassionate and understanding, White allows Buck the dignity of real raw desire and the humanity of knowing his flaws. Miguel's wise casting--there is not a shred of vanity in the using of White--and intelligent direction allow Buck's traits ample room to grow, and as a result, Buck's obsession never feels as cartoonish as it looks.

Chuck, too, is a more complex character than he originally seems. His frat-boy looks and rich-kid Hollywood trappings belie an actual loyalty to Buck that, we realize, he himself doesn't fully understand. His justified outrage at Buck's constant interruptions and creepy intrusions is as uncomfortable for him as it is for us. And, most importantly, Chuck's seemingly simple alienation from whatever sexual undercurrent wove through his childhood games with his best friend emerges as a more profound, complex influence on his mature self than he may be consciously aware. Chris Weitz nails his role, his mouth frozen in an eternal half-sneer whose other half is open incredulousness and self-reflexive shock.

But even with the strength of the script and the well-rounded talent of the cast, it is Miguel's direction that most powerfully informs the film. Last year, when visiting a mutual friend in L.A., I picked up and read a copy of the shooting script that happened to be lying around. It was plodding, shallow, simple, and dull. Worst of all, it was not funny, and I thought it was supposed to be a comedy. The film I finally saw was nothing like the script, though. Expertly treading the line between comic and tragic, faithfully imbuing the characters with deeper allegorical meanings, trusting the performances of a bunch of Hollywood neophytes, Miguel has built dimensions out of the merest suggestions, and founded his architecture on the near-universal emotional undercurrents of sexual obsession.

As finally realized, Miguel's gay-stalker-romantic comedy is none of those, but rather a film about identity, about self-image and comfort, about how our actions define us and how those definitions in turn make us act. I guess I should have given that one a bit more thought before dismissing all the Film Studies people back at my school--some of them will probably go on to make films as good as this one. Not Michael Bay, but maybe some of them.