Beware of films explicitly trying to impart life lessons. They run the risk of being trite. The Life of Chuck, with its tagline, “Every Life is a Universe All Its Own,” is such a film, although its unusual structure and smidge of Stephen King weirdness (it’s based on one of his novellas) saves it from being a complete washout.
Told in three acts, in reverse, it’s about an ordinary man whose decency and willingness to live life to its fullest turns him into a folk hero (or perhaps a messiah, or perhaps just a regular guy—it’s a bit unclear).
Act 3 is the most interesting. It’s about a teacher named Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who is dealing with the apparent end of the universe. California is leveled by an earthquake. Around the world there are fires and tsunamis. The internet goes out, which is the worst part. (He bonds with the parent of one of his students about the disconcerting lack of PornHub.)
“Is this it?” everyone asks, adding, “This sucks.” (Because, really, what else can you say?)
Marty reconnects with his ex-wife, Felicia (Karen Gillan), because no one wants to spend the end of the world alone.
Marty keeps noticing billboards with a picture of some guy named Chuck Krantz that read, “Thank you for 39 years of service.”
He finds them especially curious because the man on the billboard looks about 39 himself. How can he be retiring? Is it an old picture? And it goes beyond the billboards: There are TV commercials (although the TVs eventually go dark), graffiti, and even sky writing that spells out, “We Love Chuck.” By the end of Act 3, the ubiquity of Chuck becomes even more god-like.
In Act 2, we meet the man himself, Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), an accountant. On a business trip, he stumbles across a busking drummer (Taylor Gordon, aka The Pocket Queen) in a busy town square and spontaneously starts to dance. He’s not just nodding along to the beat—he’s giving a performance, a one-man flash mob, until he is joined by another bystander, a woman named Janice (Annalise Basso) who just got dumped by her boyfriend and clearly needed this spontaneous exultation.
Act 1 is about Chuck as a little boy, orphaned after his parents die in a car crash and raised by his kindly grandparents. They are Jewish, which…uh, if they say so. (No one in the cast looks remotely Jewish.) I was stunned to realize that the Wilford Brimley-esque man who plays Chuck’s “zadie” is Mark Hamill, who’s actually quite good here. He can mensch it up with the best of them.
Director Mike Flanagan, a Towson University grad, seems to have intentionally cast major stars from years past, as if to give older audience members a sense of déjà vu. On top of Hamill, we have Mia Sara from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as Chuck’s “bubbe” (she’s the one who teaches him to dance) and Matthew Lillard of Scream fame as one of Marty’s neighbors. Similarly, the characters seem to have mysteriously overlapping timelines. Marty, looking exactly the same as he does in Act 3, is seen in Act 1, as a teacher at the school that preteen Chuck attends. An elderly mortician (Carl Lumbly), also remains unchanged from act to act. Time is a flat circle, or something like that.
The film has two much referenced heroes—Carl Sagan, with his vision of the universe as a calendar (each month contains millions of years and we are now on December 31, with either hours or a millennia to go) and Walt Whitman, specifically his poem, “Song of Myself” (“I am large, I contain multitudes.”)
If you’re looking for an explanation of the seemingly mystical powers of Chuck (or anyone else in the film), they never truly come, except in the notion that we contain and are contained within everything we’ve seen and every life we touch. In that sense, we are all eternal. If that sort of thing sounds powerful to you, or if you’ve ever unironically used the phrase, “Dance like nobody’s watching,” this is the film for you.