Movies You Might Have Missed: Mike White's 'Chuck and Buck'

Mike White has had an intriguing career. He has written for television shows likes Freaks and Geeks and Dawson’s Creek but his own series, Enlightened, was a strange and unnerving affair quite unlike those teen dramas. For the big screen, while he went on to co-write Nacho Libre, his early work was a far cry from Jack Black’s wrestling antics. Chuck and Buck (2000), written by and starring White, may well have been marketed as a comedy but is much more akin to a dark, psychological thriller.

White plays Buck, an emotionally stunted amateur playwright in his late 20s whose mother dies unexpectedly. Seemingly unable to progress beyond the maturity level of an adolescent, the grieving son invites his childhood friend Chuck (Chris Weitz) to the funeral. The latter is now a successful music industry executive and has reinvented himself entirely, going so far as to prefer the name “Charlie” to Chuck. It transpires that the eponymous pair experimented sexually during their youth and, while Chuck has repressed the memories entirely, Buck is unable to move past them. What follows is a frightening tale of obsession that is closer to Stephen King’s Misery than a mainstream comedy.

Shot on digital video by regular White collaborator Miguel Arteta, this story of arrested development and buried sexuality hinges on inspired performances from its two leads. Weitz, fresh from directing American Pie, gives a sensitive and nuanced performance as a man fighting a battle against an opponent with no boundaries and the mentality of a 12-year-old boy. White, however, is a revelation in a role that engenders sympathy and fear in equal measure. Indeed, no less a judge than Jeff Bridges called this the best performance of the decade in a 2010 interview with The New York Times.

The dichotomy between one man refusing to let go of the past and the other refusing to acknowledge it ensures this is a stalker picture like no other. The film, like its lead, is at once scary, tender and unsettling. The more Chuck pulls away, the more aggressively Buck pursues him. Films like Love Actually show this kind of behaviour but bill it as romantic whereas White is astute enough to see this kind of thing would, in reality, play out far more like a horror movie. The writer and star’s work is unquestionably not for everyone but his is a unique voice in entertainment and this is a black comedy like no other.