[The plot of The Life of Chuck will be discussed below; read on at your own risk.]
THE LIFE OF CHUCK IS SIMULTANEOUSLY EFFECTIVE—it jerks those tears—and almost terrifyingly ineffective, a movie that feints at a sort of transcendent human depth but has a nullity at its center that undercuts the entire premise upon closer examination.
To understand why, you’ll need to know the broad strokes of the plot, including the first act twist; I think everything discussed here will be painfully obvious to any viewer about ten minutes into the movie, but still, caveat emptor. We open on “Act Three: Thanks, Chuck,” witnesses to a world on the precipice of collapse. Marty Anderson’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) America is much like ours, if ours had everything go wrong at once. California has collapsed into the ocean; wildfires rage through the Midwest; the rest of the world is starving; and, worst of all, as the film begins the internet has collapsed. The one constant? Advertisements—on billboards, radio stations, and network-TV test patterns—thanking Chuck Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) for “39 great years.”
Retirement ads? At a time like this? Why, he looks like he’s 39 himself, not a 39-year veteran of the bank—or maybe accountancy or life insurance firm; no one actually seems to know the guy—where he works. Why are these ads everywhere? And is that a tear in his eye? Hm, something feels strange about this. It’s almost as if, yes, obviously, Chuck is dying, and this is all in his mind. Indeed, he dies, and we travel backwards through time from there: The second act focuses on a near-miraculous day in the life of Chuck, in which he, a distraught passerby, and a drumming busker engage in a crowd-pleasing dancing exhibition; the first on his childhood with his doting grandparents in their darling Victorian home, one with a terrifying mystery in the attic cupola.
As I said, The Life of Chuck is effective in that it acknowledges early death is intrinsically unfair, and writer-director Mike Flanagan, adapting a Stephen King short story, understands how to milk this for all its worth. We see Chuck full of life, dancing up a storm on a random street corner, the audience cheering along. It’s a great set piece: well-staged, perfectly edited. I’m a sucker for a good drum solo, and while I’m not one for dancing, I still appreciate seeing rhythm on the screen. We also see Chuck near death, his child and his wife weeping over him, damning the unfairness of it all. We see Chuck as a child, full of hope for the future. We know how that turns out. Mistiness, achieved.
However, rather than serving as a “life-affirming masterpiece,” as the advertising for The Life of Chuck has promised, the whole charade feels weirdly empty, bereft of greater meaning. And that’s because the universe that Chuck has created in his mind—the one where we meet Marty and his ex-wife, who reconcile at their end—has no resonance through the rest of the film, no real connection to his life or what he accomplished or who he loved. A hippy-dippy teacher in Chuck’s elementary school informs him that Walt Whitman’s “I am large, I contain multitudes” refers not to the inherent contradictions of life—the different roles we play, the hypocrisies we reconcile internally—but to an actual universe created by the randomly firing neurons in our brain, an entire cosmos of imagined existences that blink out of existence when we breathe our last. The invocation of Whitman—and, later, Carl Sagan’s famous cosmic calendar, the one that informs us all of human existence takes place a few ticks before midnight in a universe condensed to a year—suggests an effort to create a sort of secular cosmology, a sense of a universe greater than the self.
But the effect is precisely the opposite. It’d be one thing if Chuck’s life of the mind represented important moments and people in his actual life, if we learned that the characters we were following were key figures in Chuck’s own world, if we discovered that he helped them find something deeper, something more meaningful, if he saved their lives or redirected the stream of their existence. But we . . . don’t. They’re just kind of random, stray thoughts. A couple of teachers, a funeral director, a little girl he saw skating on a promenade one time. And when he dies, they disappear into nothingness.
This simply does not work as a metaphor for a life well lived or a person who matters to the community; it is fundamentally solipsistic, an expression of a nearly unimaginable form of self-centeredness, almost a hope that the world ends when we die, that people cannot go on without us.
So yes, The Life of Chuck works, kinda, if what we mean by “work” is “it’ll make you tear up.” But it’s a work of nearly distressing emptiness.