All-Around Losers

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Chuck & Buck is amateurishly acted and glacially directed, and its story line is blithely blind to its most offensive implications. In short, you're going to be hearing a lot about this movie in the next few weeks. So what you're about to read constitutes fair warning: Don't believe the fuzzy buzz already surrounding it. Any movie that sentimentalizes stalking ought to be shunned.

The film's prime mover is Buck, played by its writer, Mike White, who was also a producer on the flop-d'estime TV show Freaks and Geeks. Buck is in his late 20s, but his development was arrested in preadolescence. Jobless, he lives with his mother, who dies in the opening sequence. He invites his old pal Chuck (Chris Weitz) to the funeral.

Chuck, who now prefers to be called Charlie, has not seen Buck in 15 years, has a fast-track job in the Los Angeles music industry and a seemingly strong relationship with his fiance Carlyn (Beth Colt), and has long since put aside childish things, especially his boyhood fling with Buck, who gropes him at the funeral. Undeterred by Chuck's resistance, Buck moves to Los Angeles, where Chuck becomes his occupation. Make that preoccupation. He intrudes on him at his home and his office; he peers through the window when Chuck and Carlyn make love; he mistakes their puzzled politeness for encouragement. Like any nice bourgeois couple, they are reluctant to make a scene, especially with such a pathetic case. They keep hoping he will go away.

If we develop sympathy for anyone in director Miguel Arteta's film, it is for this put-upon couple. We have all been driven crazy, sometime or other, by the peculiar persistence of the unshakable nerd who refuses to take the hint of our indifference, even when it escalates to rudeness. This nerd, though, is in a class by himself. He writes and produces what seems to be an expressionistic but childlike play about their former relationship. When it's over, he offers Chuck a deal: one night of grown-up love and then he will leave him alone.

By this time, the deal looks like the only way out for Chuck, and we are given to understand that they both emerge from the experience better men. Chuck and Carlyn get married, and Buck is seen at their wedding sidling up to a more appropriate object for his affections. We, however, are left in a somewhat larger emotional limbo.

It is not Buck's homosexuality that disturbs us. (Who, outside the Christian right, cares anymore about anyone's sexual orientation?) What's upsetting about the movie is its refusal to judge Buck's intrusiveness. Sometimes it seems to think it's funny; all the time it begs us to sympathize with it. But obsession, no less than the cell phone or the unerasability of our Internet wanderings, is a threat to our privacy, possibly our lives. Any movie, especially one as crude and inept as this one, that refuses to acknowledge that fact is dishonest--sort of a Scream IV without that series' exemplary scariness.

--By Richard Schickel