Caustic Pulp

I can only assume people enjoyed this film because it gave them some kind of emotional response and it offers the illusion of depth and complexity where none exists, but "Chuck & Buck" is the kind of film that's more or less throttled independent cinema in its crib and paved the way for similarly dire work.

"Chuck & Buck" handles very serious issues: homosexuality, adolescent sexuality, obsession, and so on. I wouldn't dream of denying a filmmaker access to this kind of material, but the filmmaker should be using these tools to plumb actual depths, to say something or have some kind of viewpoint. This is the failure of "Chuck & Buck," and it's what makes the film irresponsible and frankly, bad. These issues are easy ways to push an audience's buttons, but the film reads like the tree rape scene in "Evil Dead:" it serves no purpose but to unnerve you.

It gets worse: the film isn't even competently made. While the acting is fine, the script is rife with implausibilities and inconsistencies, and Miguel Arteta's direction is painfully one note. The film makes no attempt to explain Buck's living situation at all and refuses to diagnose him. Buck exists as a halfway point between a fleshed out character and a cipher, and this unwillingness to commit to what the hell is actually wrong with him makes it impossible to deem him plausible or not.

Characters throughout the film will do things that seem utterly contrary to either themselves or common sense, and the infamous scene between Chuck and Buck late in the film is where it lost me for good. Likewise, the denouement of the film is far too pat for something like this, and mars an already stretched-thin credibility.

If the film had been merely bad I could ignore it. But it becomes more or less offensive when you consider the messages it essentially offers on homosexuality and to a lesser extent, women. "Chuck & Buck," whether intentionally or not, essentially equates homosexuality with mental illness and discomfort and never changes that tack. Likewise, the only female character the film seems to like/favor is Beverly, essentially a sexless, matronly creature.

My classmates seemed to enjoy the film, but I found it too reprehensible and poorly made to respond with anything other than absolute disdain. Avoid.

It's beautiful to look at. It has a lot of intelligence on display. But unfortunately, it just doesn't come together. I have no doubt this is exactly the film the Coens intended to make, and you could certainly mistake this for a profound and complete film, but it has one crucial problem: everything about it is completely disjointed.

The shots themselves are framed so beautifully that each one is a portrait, but the problem is that they don't cut together well at all. There's seldom a sense of place; characters exist largely in vacuums, either occupying a frame whose background is out of focus or is otherwise somehow confined.

Scenes have the same problem, as do character motivations and continuity, and I suspect this all stems from the film being an adaptation of a novel. The people I watched the film with were constantly impressed by the intelligence and cunning shown by the characters in the film, but the problem is that there are so many gaps that their foresight borders on precognition. People are places simply because the script says so. They cross paths because the script says so.

The film ultimately feels like a distillation of all the pieces we really like about films. The Coen brothers have burned away the "excess," leaving us with pure scenes and pure shots. The problem is that in the process, what's been burned away are the threads the connect these things and make an experience feel complete.

The ending is more or less what one would expect from the disjointed film that precedes it, but it feels like an exclamation point placed on the film's central problem: how arbitrary the whole thing feels as a result of its lack of cohesion. The ending is fairly arbitrary but perhaps most damningly, is the kind of hackneyed stuff Academy awards are made of.

It's enjoyable to watch, but like so many Academy sweethearts, "No Country for Old Men" falls apart under scrutiny.