‘The Life of Chuck' is an apocalyptic, soul-seeking puzzle that's missing a few pieces
How narcissistic to believe you're living in the end times. The thought might cross your mind — I'm guilty of it, sure — but it can be chased off by imagining how it felt to witness the Dust Bowl or the French Revolution or the fall of Tenochtitlan. 'The Life of Chuck,' a sentimental jigsaw puzzle by Mike Flanagan ('Doctor Sleep') from a 50-page 2020 novella by Stephen King, argues the opposite. Here, in this backward-structured triptych of short tales, the death of an ordinary accountant, Chuck Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), is the end times, at least for the characters in his head.
Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan) and their friends and co-workers don't know their catastrophic existence is merely a dying man's reverie. Their reality is that the Earth is collapsing, even as every surface is suddenly covered with confounding billboards and commercials thanking whoever some Chuck is for '39 great years.' Of what? No one knows. 'He's our last meme,' Marty jokes. In Chuck years, the film starts when he's 39 and in his final hours of fading away from brain cancer, rewinds to nine months earlier and then leaps back to his boyhood. As the film trudges from his hospice bed to his youth, we'll come to see that the doomed townsfolk have the same faces and mannerisms of people Chuck knew as a child.
It's a heartening, humanistic thesis that even a rather dull dude like Chuck has an inner life that rivals 'The Iliad.' Paradoxically, that way of thinking belongs specifically to storytellers like King, who make up whole yarns about anonymous humans on the street. My mental landscape may just be grocery lists and song lyrics.
To emphasize its timeline, the movie titles its first section Act Three. The book did the same thing. 'The Life of Chuck' is a nearly line-by-line faithful adaptation, with a few more jokes and heavy use of a narrator, Nick Offerman, who reads King's words with a nature documentarian's gusto. Originally, King was inspired only to write the middle-aged Chuck chapters, and then a year later he bound those pieces together by adding the boyhood kicker and its superfluous supernatural element. In his author's note, King said he'd leave the success of his narrative architecture 'up to readers to determine.'
Well, it doesn't work. But I can see why he tried the rearrangement. The closing section has the most Chuck, which makes it the most banal. An orphan who lives with his grandparents, Albie and Sarah (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara), Chuck pads through a rather milquetoast coming-of-age sketch. He endures loss, visits his neighbor Vera (Heather Langenkamp) and along the line learns to waltz, samba and moonwalk. (Young Chuck is played at various ages by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay.) He also discovers a mystical portal at the top of the stairs that the script doesn't satisfyingly explore. Instead, it simply muddles the everyman point of the film. If you started the movie at the end, you wouldn't be champing to find out what happens next.
But the apocalyptic opening act is pretty great. For 15 minutes, nearly every line of dialogue could be an elevator pitch for a Roland Emmerich movie: earthquakes in California, volcanoes in Germany, a nuclear meltdown in Japan. All these calamities are happening simultaneously — so many disasters coming at such speed that the bad news slams into Marty like a psychological avalanche. Luckily, the internet is also glitching, causing a vicarious thrill when Marty quits trying to get service and throws away his phone.
There's a stand-out scene where Matthew Lillard, playing Marty's acquaintance Gus, advises him to take a detour to work as a sinkhole has just opened up on the road to his commute. Twenty drivers are trapped at the bottom, some of whom, Gus says nonchalantly, are 'probably not coming out.' The incomprehensibility of it all, of every awful thing wreaking havoc at once, has Gus in a state of jocular shock. Until almost without him aware of it, a tear slips loose.
We don't see much of this destruction on-screen. Flanagan is strictly interested in what futility does to the human soul — and how it can be a salve, too. By his reckoning, suicide and marriage rates will rise. Gillan's Felicia, who is both a despondent nurse and a lonely divorcée, nicely illustrates why. I'm inclined to believe him, and it's also a gas to eavesdrop on Marty's parent-teacher conferences, where the adults no longer give a flying fig about their kids' futures. One dad (David Dastmalchian) spends the session whining about his inability to pull up internet porn.
Mood-wise, this first section is magnificently done (although the celestial spa-music score by the Newton Brothers is a twinkle too much). In the spirit of schadenfreude, I'd have happily watched a whole additional hour of this Chuck-driven armageddon where, as his body collapses, the stars in the sky blink out one by one. Pity as its title character gains health, the film loses its verve.
The second act is a likable, fragile bubble of an idea. One afternoon before his terminal diagnosis, the adult Chuck takes a stroll and spontaneously dazzles a crowd with a dance number done in wordless alliance with two strangers, a lovelorn book clerk (Annalise Basso) and a street drummer (Taylor Gordon). The performance is elaborate and delightful and impeccably choreographed, with Hiddleston doing long-legged strides as though he's the second coming of Christopher Walken. Like the film's central conceit, it's about making magic out of the mundane. Shrewdly, once the exuberance ends, Flanagan lets the blahs back in. The musical trio regresses into that awkwardness of knowing they've shared a special moment, but there isn't much left to say to each other besides so long and good luck.
The movie has a key advantage over the book. Flanagan can visually emphasize that Chuck's mind contains a universe of memories. For starters, he's double-cast many of the actors; tragic Marty was once a teacher who young Chuck spotted in the hall. (To my disappointment, we never spot Lillard and Dastmalchian again.) But even the casting itself deliberately tugs on our own memories. An unusual number of the supporting players are beloved for one famous role — not just big parts, but eternal parts — that have so immortalized them in the public's consciousness that their fictional identities have supplanted their real ones. Hamill, of course, was in 'Star Wars,' Sara in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off,' Langenkamp in 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' and Lillard in 'Scream.' If it was just one or two icons, you might not bat an eye. But at this concentration, the film itself is making a statement even to the most grocery list-minded of us. There are faces who will live in our brains until we die.
As philosophical puzzles go, 'The Life of Chuck' doesn't add up to much. But I'm glad I saw it for one reason. A few days later, I was recounting the plot to a friend at a Koreatown steakhouse that had just opened for the afternoon. We were alone in a back booth when the waiter approached and said he'd overheard us mention moonwalking. He hit play on his phone and began to pop and lock and, yes, attempt to moonwalk on the carpet. Thinking of the message of the movie — that these might ultimately be the only moments that matter — I forced myself to stand up and join him in doing the robot. Together, we made magic out of the mundane and it was marvelous.
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