Twenty years after his feature directorial debut, House of D, David Duchovny is back behind the camera with another tale about navigating an emotional coming-of-age in the 1970s. Whereas that earlier movie was met with widespread critical disdain (“the flat tone and feel of a TV soap opera”; “sappy, inane, cornball, shameless”; “unwatchable”), it seems unlikely that Bucky F*cking Dent will meet the same fate as its cloyingly sentimental, semi-autobiographical predecessor.
It’s the summer of 1978. When Ted (Logan Marshall-Green) isn’t hawking peanuts at baseball games, he’s trying unsuccessfully to write a publishable novel, hoping that the 13th time will be the charm. After he gets a call from the hospital and finds out that his estranged dad Marty (Duchovny) has been struggling with a terminal cancer diagnosis, Ted decides to move back in with him to help, and try to mend that relationship while there’s still time.
Marty is an avid baseball fan, who suffers physically when his beloved Boston Red Sox lose. So with the help of Marty’s friends, Ted constructs a fictional winning streak for the Sox to keep his dad as well as he can for as long as he can.
Although Bucky F*cking Dent was adapted for the screen from a David Duchovny novel by David Duchovny, who directs, produces and stars, the movie doesn’t suffer from Duchovny overwhelm, and thankfully stays far away from vanity project territory. Marshall-Green has the bigger role here, as the peanut vendor whose soul is slowly calcifying in a haze of regret and self-loathing. In the middle of the 2010s, films like The Invitation and Upgrade seemed to promise a fruitful leading man career for Marshall-Green that never quite materialized; Bucky F*cking Dent reminds us of his laidback charisma and easy hold of the camera. (Plus, that ‘70s long hair and mutton chops combo is a good look for him!)
Stealing the movie out from beneath both of them is Stephanie Beatríz, who plays the fabulously-named Mariana Blades: Death Specialist (a TV show if ever there was one), there to help terminally ill patients like Marty navigate the end of their lives. At first, it appears as if she’s going to exist just as an underwritten love interest, there solely to make the men feel better about themselves. Yet even before the film starts unfurling her backstory, Beatríz has suggested waves of pain beneath her placid surface, and Duchovny’s screenplay gives her character the most thematic heavy-lifting. Beatriz handles it with the quiet confidence of someone with many more movie roles on their CV.
Any work of fiction centered around terminal illness is always staring down the dangerous lure of mawkishness. Happily, Bucky F*cking Dent refuses to succumb, its rich vein of often-profane humor proving a formidable weapon in the battle against schmaltz. While the comic scenes do tend to be the film’s weakest (an early example featuring a Pamela Adlon cameo seems to belong in a different, broader movie), more of them work than don’t, with the ease of delivery in the bantering between Duchovny and Marshall-Green helping to sell even the weaker lines. Duchovny has a deft sense of how long to extend his more high-concept gags, with the technicalities of the scheme to keep Marty believing in the Red Sox winning streak (most amusingly, a water pipe and a couple of baking trays to imitate a rain delay-causing storm) set aside when they no longer serve the story.
As well as punchlines, Bucky F*cking Dent is a film full of ideas. The whole scheme to keep Marty going through faking a winning streak for the Red Sox is a metaphor for the movie’s interest in how very much our minds and bodies are connected. You could trivialize it as “the power of positive thinking,” but that would be unfairly reductive for a screenplay that continually exhibits genuine empathy for those struggling with loss and disappointment. The discussions around how the search for a little bit of hope—even if it’s in something as low stakes as a baseball game—can be transformative during rough times always feel as if they come from a place of lived experience, not embroidery on a throw pillow.
And any accusations of triteness are rendered void by a big move that Duchovny-the-writer takes at the emotional climax of his movie. The tricky relationship between Marty and Ted never really feels like it needs an explanation—complicated ties between parents and their grown children are just par for the course in art and in life—so it’s a surprise when we get one, and even more of a surprise when it’s devastating on a literally metaphysical level. It’s a big, brave swing on the part of a writer/director with little experience under his belt in both of those departments, so it’s gratifying that he doesn’t miss, and in the process delivers what is quite possibly the finest single scene performance of his career.
Though it takes place within the familiar thematic ground of terminal illness and fathers and sons, that willingness to take emotional risks, alongside the finely-drawn characters and beautiful performances, makes Bucky F*cking Dent a deeply lovely movie. His first film may have been a dud, but 20 years later, Duchovny the writer/director has finally proven himself a force to be reckoned with.
Director: David Duchovny
Writer: David Duchovny
Starring: David Duchovny, Logan Marshall-Green, Stephanie Beatriz
Release Date: March 6, 2024 (Glasgow Film Festival)
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.