How do you tell the story of a life? That’s a question many of the characters in “Bucky F*cking Dent” poise aloud, a little too aware of their construction. It’s a question its star David Duchovny should have asked himself behind the camera, too. His direction of a script he adapted from his novel of the same name flunks page-to-screen 101 because Duchovny has put content so far ahead of form.
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This baseball-centric drama about the reconciliation of a father and son does have its heart in the right place. Duchovny gives viewers gobs of time just to marinate with Logan Marshall-Green’s Teddy Fulilove, dubbed “Edgar Allan Peanut” by his fellow Yankee Stadium concession stand salesmen. The hippie-haired stoner and aspiring writer lives a mostly unbothered existence in 1978 New York City, but he can never be really fulfilled until he clears up the root of all his ills. That is, of course, the tiny yet nagging trauma from feeling like his apathetic father, Marty (Duchovny), did not give him enough attention and adoration as a child.
Teddy is an “uninteresting white man living in uninteresting times,” as a literary agent played by Pamela Adlon tells him early in the film. But he gets a chance to be engaging in the movie. (Or, rather, have interesting things happen to him.) Marty nears the terminal stage of his battle with cancer out in the New Jersey suburbs, and Teddy grows determined to spend as much time as possible with his old man.
After chatting with some barbershop cronies, Teddy realizes his dad’s health can fluctuate along the rollercoaster of his beloved Boston Red Sox – a team for whom he cheers primarily to troll his tri-state neighbors. He then hatches a scheme best described as “Florence Foster Jenkins” for working-class men. Teddy gets buy-in from the townspeople to fake like the Sox are on an improbable hot streak to prolong Marty’s life.
This concept alone feels enough to sustain the entire duration, yet it only amounts to one major narrative arc that spans just half of “Bucky F*cking Dent.” These miniature movements work on the page, but the film feels like an extra-innings game because Duchovny hasn’t translated them into the scale of cinema. The sheer volume of scenes where nothing happens except “guys being dudes” ends up becoming punishing, not pleasurable. Moments like trading farts in a motel room or their awkward locker room bonding where Marty demands to examine his son’s endowment become rarities in this 105-minute slog.
Sports often provide a therapeutic outlet for reticent men to share their feelings. Facing forward rather than each other, they can lean into a simply defined conflict and open up about murkier ones in their own lives. Yet when both Marty and Teddy are incredibly articulate to the point of writing entire books that they won’t talk to one another about, baseball becomes perfunctory to the narrative and their conversations. At best, the Red Sox are background chatter to their prolonged rehashings of past grievances.
The film loses even further focus, especially in the soporific back half of “Bucky F*ing Dent,” which consists primarily of the boys on a road trip to a fateful Fenway Park game. Duchovny gives himself countless capital-A “Acting” moments as Marty waxes poetic on death and the meaning of life. There clearly needed to be someone on set to reign in the multihyphenate’s impulses because it ends up clouding out the journey of Teddy, the story’s real protagonist.
While Logan Marshall-Green is roughly a decade too old to play his character, he does provide some of the film’s few sparks of excitement. There’s genuine emotional shading and evolution to Teddy over time. These touches are almost enough to overcome some of the clichéd father-son hokum, as well as the riposting-turned-romancing with “death specialist” Mariana (Stephanie Beatriz) in which he must participate. Marshall-Green provides clarity that Teddy’s confusion belongs to the character, not the actor. But like everything else in this old-school outing, it would be helped by the cinematic equivalent of a pitch clock. [C-]
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