Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, with Sundance 2025 winding down this weekend, let’s revisit Mike White’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck, which premiered at the festival 25 years ago.As the Sundance Film Festival wraps up its 2025 edition this weekend, we continue to look back at groundbreaking queer stories and voices that premiered there in the past. With the highly anticipated third season of The White Lotus dropping in just a few weeks, this week we’ll discuss one of series creator Mike White’s earliest works that also happens to be celebrating its 25th anniversary.Mike White has always had an affinity for rather prickly characters and stories.
Although he’s shot to notoriety over the last few years for his work in the aforementioned White Lotus on HBO (which earned him dozens of awards for his writing and directing, and took many of his stars’ careers to the next level), he has been consistently working since the late ’90s, often exploring similar themes.White seems to be fascinated with people that portray an outside air of goodness, generosity, or sympathy, but are actually filled with a rotten ego and sense of self-righteousness that sometimes even they are unaware of. This recurs over and over in films like The Good Girl, Year Of The Dog, Beatriz At Dinner, and the cult HBO series Enlightened, starring Laura Dern.
But this particular fixation—a fitting descriptor for this movie—goes all the wayback to the 2000 acidic comedy Chuck & Buck….Chuck & Buck follows Buck O’Brien (played by White himself), a young man grieving the death of his mother after a long illness. He invites his childhood friend Chuck (Chris Weitz)—who now goes by “Charlie”—to the funeral alongside his fiancée Carlyn (Beth Colt).
Out of sympathy, they invite Buck to visit them in Los Angeles whenever he wants, which he promptly takes them up on.It’s soon clear that Buck has held a deep, complex fixation with Chuck ever since they were kids. He
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