The Life of Chuck
Tom Hiddleston in The Life of Chuck
It isn’t until The Life of Chuck’s second chapter that we actually meet its title character, by which point the world (or at least a world) might have already ended.
The apocalypse comes gradually, then suddenly. California falls into the sea in chunks, the bubonic plague reemerges in Asia, and a volcano erupts in Germany. For the most part, people seem fairly calm about it all — it's not like people haven't been predicting the end of the world for as long as the world has existed. Not until the internet goes down for good — even the pornography, one character notes mournfully — does reality fully set in. None of this stops the ubiquitous billboards: “Charles Krantz, 39 great years, thanks Chuck!” They’re everywhere, but no one seems to know who the bespectacled man is or what it is he’s retiring from.
The Life of Chuck is based on Stephen King’s 2020 novella of the same name and directed by Mike Flanagan, who also helmed the sneakily good King adaptation Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining. He’s best known for a quintet of Netflix miniseries — The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and The Fall of the House of Usher — that have established him as one of the horror world’s foremost auteurs. Like King, whose novel Gerald’s Game he also adapted, Flanagan has never shied away from overt displays of emotion on either end of the spectrum. This latest entry is his least frightening work to date, but it’s also his most moving.
Stephen King movies are scary, except when they’re not. Though obviously known for genre classics like The Shining, It, and Carrie, the king of horror also penned the source material behind such life-affirming fare as Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Green Mile. The latest adaptation of his work falls squarely in the latter category, which isn’t to say it’s without the occasional scare. It’s just that most of them come from pondering our place in the universe, the cosmic insignificance of which is either comforting or terrifying depending on how long you’ve been stargazing that night.
The film is divided into three chapters presented in reverse chronological order, the first of which is overtly apocalyptic. It follows a schoolteacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who takes solace in the end of all things by reminding himself and his ex-wife (Karen Gillan) that, in the cosmic sense, humans just appeared on the planet and our absence from it is a mere return to the natural order. Though cutaways to a deceptively old-looking man in a hospital bed being tended to by his wife and son hint at what’s happening, the subtlety adds to the intrigue.
The second and third chapters turn our attention to Chuck, first as an adult played by Tom Hiddleston and then as a child. In both we see his love of dance: how it comes to him from his effervescent grandmother and how it manifests decades later in the form of an impromptu street performance accompanied by a busking drummer. These are scenes from a life, not narrative beats in a typical three-act structure, and consistently moving in their authenticity. The Life of Chuck has the same love-it-or-hate-it vibe as a lot of life-affirming movies that occasionally veer on sentimentality, but Flangan doesn’t hit a single insincere note.
Stephen King movies are scary, except when they’re not.
Poetry is as important to the movie as dance, specifically Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and its immortal refrain:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
There’s nothing rare or unique about Chuck at first glance, which is, of course, the point. Ordinary people have rich inner lives full of faded memories that influence them in ways they’ll never be fully aware of. What makes this unassuming accountant and his 39 years special is the fact that there are countless others like him. You don’t have to be a world leader or celebrity to have your story told or have others find meaning in it. It helps that there’s a touch of the unknown throughout, a rare feeling of cosmic grandeur alongside everyday occurrences, but at the center of it all is still a normal guy whose very existence proves how little daylight there is between ordinary and extraordinary. Is that sappy? Very well then, it’s sappy. Chuck contains multitudes, and so does this movie.
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