The Life of Chuck (3 stars out of 4)
Sometimes when I watch a movie I feel like the filmmaker is trying to solve a puzzle with only half the pieces. This is how I felt watching “Life of Chuck.” Mike Flanagan’s film is thoughtful and aspirational, and worthy of praise. And yet, his adaptation of the Stephen King novella left me coming away a little disappointed.
The film is told in three acts, presented in reverse order, so it’s tricky to avoid spoilers entirely. Act Three mainly follows the story of a school teacher named Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who has the unenviable task of trying to go about his job while the world around him is ending…literally.
We mostly hear the evidence secondhand: earthquakes have dumped most of California into the sea. The Midwest is consumed in wildfire. Florida has flooded. Worst of all for many, the Internet is completely offline. Marty tries to put on a good face and focus on his job, but he’s the last person to accept that the world he knows is coming to an end.
Weirdly, in the midst of all this, Marty keeps noticing ambiguous billboards and TV advertisements thanking a man named Chuck for 39 years of service…in something or other. Eventually Marty decides to reconnect with his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan) as the cataclysms pass the point of no return, but even as the world circles the drain, some mystical power seems determined to offer a shout-out to the enigmatic Chuck.
Act Two sends us back in time about nine months, where we meet the titular Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) going about an otherwise routine day. He’s an accountant, a stiff well-dressed man of numbers, but a street musician (Taylor Franck) stops him in his tracks, and moments later he’s dancing in an intersection with a woman named Janice (Annalise Basso).
This introduction leads us into the meat of the film, which explores Chuck’s past, and eventually explains his connection to what we saw in the first half hour of the film. We meet Chuck as a youngster (played by Benjamin Pajak, then Jacob Tremblay), we meet his grandmother Sarah (Mia Sara), who taught him to dance, and we meet his grandfather Albie (Mark Hamill), who steered him down the road to chartered accountancy.
Much of what follows explores universal themes and conflicts, like the meaning of life and the clash between our dreams and our reality. Often the film references the idea of the Cosmic Calendar, which puts the Big Bang on January 1st and squeezes all of human history into the last ten seconds of December 31st.
And this is where things fall a little flat. “The Life of Chuck” aspires to be an inspiring story about the substance of our lives, and the lasting connections we make with other people. And in a lot of ways, it succeeds. But its sense of aspiring spirituality feels incomplete, trying to find hope and meaning within the bounds of the science we understand without considering the promise of we’ve been asked to accept on faith.
As a production, “The Life of Chuck” is sweet and thoughtful, with good performances and creative moments. But as a message, its hopes feel limited, and as an experience Flanagan’s film feels like it’s still grasping for its full potential. It’s also an awfully strange candidate for R-rated status, thanks to some scattered profanity that belies the movie’s generally family-friendly tone.
Whether it’s the source material or the vision of the filmmakers, “The Life of Chuck” feels designed for an audience that doesn’t know what it can hope for.
“The Life of Chuck” is rated R for some scattered profanity.