Baseball and film aren’t so different. Both are a national pastime, and both traditionally enforce a sort of spiritual mindfulness that is otherwise associated with church. In one, you congregate around a common goal in a big stadium of strangers, its eye open to the sky, its constituents reuniting in song and drink and finding common humanity. Just by proximity to the glory lived by another man “going down in history,” we go along with him. This experience isn’t dissimilar to moviegoing, where we sit in a darkened theater for two hours of solemn meditation and experience, with varying focus, the hero’s journey through a myth. From The Pride of the Yankees to 42, baseball has frequently been a framework for critically assessing everyday banality through that of baseball and the broader social rules, written and unwritten, that govern it.
It’s unsurprising, then, that David Duchovny, actor and one-time Ivy League English academic, has added to this canon with Bucky F*cking Dent, his second go-round at the directorial mound. Duchovny isn’t new to the material of this father-son dramedy, as it’s actually an adaptation of his sophomore novel, published to relative critical success back in 2016. Here, he also stars as Marty, a terminally-ill Red Sox fan who reconnects with his Yankees-loving, novel-writing, and peanut-vending son, Ted (Logan Marshall-Green), during the 1978 pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox — in what appears to be the last time for Marty to experience Red Sox triumph.
The possibility of this triumph is vital to Marty’s survival, because at the outset of the film, both father and son fashion themselves as failures. Ted has written twelve unpublished manuscripts, but according to his agent, he “hasn’t lived and has nothing real to write about.” Marty, meanwhile, grapples with feelings of guilt for his ineptitude as a husband and father, and is shown in the film’s prologue to prefer chain-smoking daydreams and Sunday baseball over spending time with his wife. Ted moves back to take care of Marty, who rarely leaves his house other than to greet his barbershop friends (Evan Handler, Jason Beghe) and work with his “death specialist” Mariana (Stephanie Beatriz), a nurse assigned to guide Marty in his march toward death.
Much occurs across Bucky F*cking Dent’s 100 minutes, although nothing feels new. Duchovny takes the viewer through traditional narrative beats — the slow reunion, the betrayal, the reconciliation, the sweet departure — but does so with such melancholic force that it prevents the film from developing its own organic inertia. One of its major outward tensions revolves around Marty’s psychosomatic link between the strength of the Red Sox’s onfield performance and the strength of his health, as well as the interplay between that relationship and the one between father and son. Hoping to mend ties with his father while he still can, Ted takes it upon himself to ensure that the Red Sox are always winning by affirming a false reality for his dad.
With the help of Mariana, Marty’s barber shop friends, and the newspaper boy, Ted manufactures a system that makes his house a “bubble, a closed system,” disconnected from the world by a sabotaged TV connection and hidden daily newspapers. At one point, Ted even goes as far as to simulate rain and the sound of thunder just to convince his father that a Red Sox game had been rained out. Ted tries to play God, but just as soon as he finds he can’t fake his way out of being found, he understands, too, that he can’t make his dad better.
The problem of this tension isn’t that its execution feels rushed or underwhelming, because the plot is relatively rushed and underwhelming, and thus moves out of frame without friction or strain. Instead, the issue, which dogs the entirety of the film, is that its coarse manipulation seems to mimic its central conceit. Neither Ted, a grown man estranged from his father, nor Marty, a wise-cracking curmudgeon, make for sensible dance partners in such a tango of deception, and the two frequently stumble into sentimentality while lacking the magnetism needed to pull the story along on its own. Viewers aren’t allowed to sit back and watch this film like they’re at the ball game, allowing themselves to form a perspective, to let things settle. Within its first five minutes, everything already feels like a fixed game, discouraging viewers from placing bets and players from playing at all.
Ultimately, however, Bucky F*cking Dent’s playfulness is what makes it compelling enough to float through, despite the weakness of its central tension and the peripheral plot tangents that manifest in puddles of stepped-over nothing. Duchovny is often hilarious with his bag of dry, coarse vulnerability, and Marshall-Green, overcoming a slow start, adapts well to the former’s space on screen. By the film’s second half, the duo are thankfully more inclined to lobbing witty jokes than indulging soddy sentimentality. But despite this welcome course correction, Bucky F*cking Dent is unfortunately never quite able to strike a careful balance between these tonal poles, and it ends up feeling more like a vandalized hallmark card than a dry comedy earnestly wading through themes of loyalty, failure, and loss. Duchovny has in his hands a work leathered in emotion and threaded with humor, but he just can’t seem to send it through the strike zone.
Published as part of InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 24
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