Images courtesy of NEON
THE LIFE OF CHUCK– 4 STARS
There’s an unforgettable central dance number in the second act of Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck that everyone coming out of the film is going to talk about. Unleashing smooth dance moves arranged by award-winning choreographer Mandy Moore, Tom Hiddleston of Marvel Cinematic Universe villainy fame is the titular buttoned-up man in a suit who hears the drum kit beats of a street busker (“The Pocket Queen” musician Taylor Gordon), casts cares aside, and begins to tear up a sunny small-town Alabama street corner with struts, shuffles, and shimmies. Watching the lithe Tom put on this show is akin to the surprise of seeing Christopher Walken dancing up a storm in a deserted hotel lobby in the famous Fatboy Slim music video for “Weapon of Choice.” A woman named Janice (Annalise Basso of Captain Fantastic) is drawn to step forward and join him, and the two dazzle the gathered crowd of locals, and us too, pinned to our seats.
Even with some marinating narration from Nick Offerman stiffly introducing this moment and its moving pieces, the scene comes out of nowhere. It stands as an elative zig-zag to lift what had started as a hauntingly dour film. In the half-hour before this centerpiece crescendo, The Life of Chuck only presented Tom Hiddleston as a peculiar face on various advertisements popping up around town, as society is shown steadily collapsing during the apocalyptic end of the world. Coming out of the first chapter of The Life of Chuck, who knew they had something this inexplicable, beautiful, and maybe even magical in them?
LESSON #1: LIFE’S A DANCE— This rapturous dance provides an exhale after an extended period of weathering intensity. It’s a hell of a swerve to navigate and extrapolate. How does even one try? Forgive the hayseed roots that will show with this reference, but this writer couldn’t help but have the refrain from a 33-year-old country song come to mind. The handsomely-dimpled John Michael Montgomery’s debut 1992 single, “Life’s a Dance,” repeats this chorus:
Life’s a dance, you learn as you go
Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow
Don’t worry ’bout what you don’t know
Life’s a dance, you learn as you go
As hokey as those honky-tonk lyrics read, accepting The Life of Chuck, based on the perplexing 2020 novella from national treasure author Stephen King and unfolding in the same reverse chronological order, is honestly that simple. There will be moments when you are ahead of greater meanings, and others will lead you on a chase. Pause your despair and let this movie’s prodigious heart come to you. If you can muster that patience and squash the cynicism that keeps you from opening your mind fully, you will be greatly rewarded. Still, that’s a tough ask.
The stupendous sequence of choreography and music serves as the hinge point of the entire movie. As aforementioned, less than ten minutes before Hiddleston’s joyful routine, stars and planets were blinking out of existence like snuffed dots of candlelight in the wide night sky before the eyes of two terrified onlookers—Chiwetel Ejiofor’s school teacher Marty Anderson and his ER nurse ex-wife Felicia Gordon plated by Karen Gillan— we come to know long before Chuck. In the other direction, fifteen minutes after the big dance, Chuck is shown as a youngster and teen (newcomer Benjamin Pajak and Room’s all-grown-up Jacob Tremblay) living a modest life with his grandparents. These two relatives would become the guiding figures of his fears, talents, intellect, and empathy.
LESSON #2: CAN YOU ASSIGN IMPORTANCE TO A SINGLE, VITAL MOMENT IN LIFE?— Here’s what the tough ask is for The Life of Chuck. Can a person’s life—or a film, for that matter—assign importance to essentially a singular vital moment? Is it worth the extensive exploration and the depth of fate given to it? To do so is asking one brilliant scene to carry the rest of the movie and give it all meaning. Distilling King’s novella, writer-director Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep) had the challenge of defining such importance in two separate eras of time.
LESSON #3: WHERE AND WHO DO YOU WANT TO BE WITH IF THE WORLD WAS ENDING— Remember, the beginning of The Life of Chuck is the absolute, dire end. Is Chuck Krantz worth being the meme-like mythic figure seen by all while systems of infrastructure fail and natural disasters send mankind reeling towards catastrophe? Nobody knows who he is, yet his visage is the last thing people see. How much can fall apart before you do, while normalcy is fading? Ejifor and Gillan are eeking out an existence against absenteeism with their strong connection and sustaining melancholy. No doubt, they are embodying each other’s answer to the hypothetical questions of where and who you want to be with if the world were ending. Their fear touches us, all while the notion of Chuck, the person, is a delusory distraction. It’s as if those two are in a different epic or movie entirely, and that counts as an issue.
The easier path for finding consequence is looking into Chuck’s origins during the concluding Act One of The Life of Chuck. Played by film legend Mark Hamill, leaning on surly sagacity, and the long-lost and still-luminous Mia Sara of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Albie and Sarah Krantz come to raise Chuck after the death of their son, their pregnant daughter-in-law, and granddaughter-to-be. That tragedy has hollowed out the alcoholic Albie to a constant state of trepidation and sorrow, right down to cryptically fearing ghosts in the locked cupola of their antique house and imploring Chuck to stick with the certainty of mathematics for a career path. Sarah is a far more positive presence, taking on the necessary parenting role for her surviving grandson.
LESSON #4: THE FORMATIVE INSPIRATIONS AND ARTISTIC ROOTS OF YOUTH— It is her vivaciousness that forms Chuck’s artistic roots. While her husband is away, Sarah takes to introducing him to the media she loves in a warm montage sequence. She shows him a primer of old movie musicals rented from Blockbuster Video, and they practice the dance moves in the living room or the kitchen while listening to 80s rock on the radio. Her favorites become his interests and, soon, shared passions. Their quality time grants him a talent different and richer than his typical peers, something that will germinate further when he joins the dance club at school run by the P.E. teacher Miss Richards (Flanagan’s wife Kate Siegel) and impresses an older female classmate (Trinity Bliss of the Avatar series).
By the time The Life of Chuck reaches this chronologically first, but cinematically final chapter, the thematic callbacks, grander symbolism, and easter egg inclusions of “everything you see, everything you know” from the previous acts flow freely. King and Flanagan engage everything from Gene Kelly’s charisma in Cover Girl and Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk to the cornerstone platitudes of Walt Whitman and Carl Sagan. Some notes mesh swimmingly, and others defy matching logic, making one question what is, on a universe-sized level, real or imagined. This mental endeavor is sure to slot The Life of Chuck as the headiest and possibly the most random film seen in quite a long time.
However, echoing Lesson #2, there is a need—no, a demand—for The Life of Chuck to justify all of this effort spent on destiny, mortality, philosophy, happenstance, Offerman’s narration, and the moods created by the foreboding musical score of The Newton Brothers. What’s happening is odd, whimsical, and terribly specific. From that list, the happenstance of this tale is probably the biggest obstacle to connection and comprehension. To have the spiritual center of one’s shelved youthful passion manifest itself as a zenith as slight as a moment of public performance, only for it to become a trigger for the coming global extinction stamped by that person’s smiling face, is the stretch of all stretches. That’s the work of Stephen King for you, and reconciling that over-arching causality is bound to detach some viewers.
LESSON #5: BROADEN THE EXPERIENCES TO SEE YOURSELF— To remove the complication, broaden the experiences you are watching in The Life of Chuck. Remove the singular specifics and embrace what is, quite honestly, inconsequential. That inconsequentiality is the very point because lovely randomness and uniqueness are precisely what is special about a person. None of us is Chuck Krantz to a T. None of us are supposed to be. But, I bet you have your equivalent core memory of a dance in the street or a moment of bliss that returned to you later in life. I bet you have your Cover Girl or Walt Whitman artistic inspirations deep inside. I bet you have your internal narrator or an extra parental figure in your history. King and Flanagan are banking on that personal profundity as much as I am in this critique.
To Chuck Krantz and each person, those touchstones that spark your life are very real and the opposite of inconsequential in our hearts. Moreover, think of the community aspect of intersecting lives. You have very likely purposely or inadvertently witnessed someone else’s life-altering or life-affirming moment, like a dance in the street or a viral moment. What little thing that briefly caught your eye and attention was huge for someone else. Leaping even further, the movie dares to probe where people end up in life after their greatest memories and whether or not the finality of mortal destiny dulls those moments.
One could go on and on, playing out those hypothetical scenarios and more after the movie. If you can reach this plane of empathetic understanding through the abnormal twists and turns of The Life of Chuck, you have found yourself one marvelous movie. If you can’t, or swaying between bliss and death makes you cynical or uncomfortable, you might be a little dead inside. That’ll be on you and not Mike Flanagan.
LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#13__)
