“Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.” That saying from the Talmud — popularized as a tagline for Schindler’s List, in which Ben Kingsley’s Itzak Stern quotes the line — is not used in The Life of Chuck, but in my mind it might as well be. I cannot watch or think of the movie without thinking of that saying. As the Talmud emphasizes, the loss of one life is the loss of the whole world to that person: the loss of that person’s whole world; of the world reflected in that person’s soul; of the inner, subjective world modeled on the outer objective one.
The Life of Chuck is about the end of the world, and also about the death of one Charles “Chuck” Krantz, who, as you might guess from his surname, is Jewish. It is also about Chuck’s life, and so it is also, in a way, about the whole world. Among other things, it is about moments in our lives in which darkness and pain seem to rob the world of meaning, and we wonder what is the point of it all — why God would bother to create the world in the first place. It is also about moments so perfect that they seem to answer the question: moments in which we feel that God could have created the world solely for this, and it would be enough.
Lovingly adapted from Stephen King’s novella of the same name, The Life of Chuck was written and directed by Mike Flanagan, for whom the material is so well suited that King might as well have written it for him. Both storytellers are best known for horror, which The Life of Chuck is not, despite some eerie Twilight Zone weirdness and a locked room full of ghosts, which is the part that most feels like King wrote it for Flanagan. (Among the logos opening the film is Flanagan’s label, Red Room Pictures, named for the locked room full of ghosts in The Haunting of Hill House.) But there’s also an underlying sentimental humanism in their outputs: an effort to make sense of it all, to vindicate life as meaningful.
Tom Hiddleston plays Chuck as a man nearing the threshold of middle age, though he will never reach it. The film repeatedly recalls Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar, which uses a calendar year as a metaphor for framing the scale of the history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present. In this framing, of course, it is always The End: December 31st, with the final stroke of midnight always imminent but never arriving — an implicitly apocalyptic framing. What if we instead used a calendar year to map the whole arc of the universe, ending in universal heat death? In that framing, we would likely currently be in no later than mid-February! On the other hand, if the calendar ends with the end of life on Earth, we might be in mid-November. A lot depends on the question you ask.
What is important for Chuck is that he himself is a man in what might reasonably be thought his personal June, when in fact Chuck’s life-year is drawing to a close. That’s when we actually meet him in “Act 2”; in the opening act, which is unexpectedly labeled “Act 3,” Charles Krantz is only a name and face on an enigmatic marketing campaign congratulating him on “39 great years” with the addendum “Thanks, Chuck!” You will not be surprised to learn that the movie ends with “Act 1.”
Who is the face on the billboards and TV screens? No one seems to know. Certainly Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a schoolteacher, and Felicia (Karen Gillan), an overworked nurse, have more important things to worry about as they doggedly go about doing their jobs, seeking to maintain a semblance of normality in a world reeling from seemingly apocalyptic goings-on, from major internet outages to disasters around the world. For Marty, students are disengaged, parents aren’t much less so, and everyone seems near to giving up. Felicia’s hospital shift call themselves the Suicide Squad for spiking suicide rates, though Felicia finds hope in the thought that perhaps marriages are up more than divorces. Divorces, after all, are long, messy processes, and who has time for that at the end of the world? Better to face the end with someone familiar at your side.
As “Act 3” draws to a close, the weirdness increases, and one effect in particular is far more haunting on the screen than on the printed page. This Twilight Zoney opening is a downbeat triumph, and if the film ended there, it would be a memorable, philosophically evocative little curiosity. “Act 2,” though, adds something important: joy, gratitude, wonder. In its own low-key way this exuberant middle act is almost a second Twilight Zone episode, though nothing paranormal happens; the mystery is that of existence, of an out-of-the-blue gift that heightens awareness of the gift of life itself.
In this middle act we meet Janice (Annalise Basso), a young woman smarting from a graceless breakup, and Taylor (Taylor Gordon), a Juilliard dropout drummer busking as much for fun as for cash. What follows is received with wonder and gratitude by the characters, and is meant as a gift to the viewer as well as the characters; it is the heart of the movie, and the film’s biggest risk. How it lands for you will probably determine how you feel about the whole. If you decide that you hate it, I understand.
I’ve seen The Life of Chuck twice now — the reverse three-act structure practically demands it — and watching “Act 2” the first time, I realized I was rooting for the film to succeed, which is usually a good sign. What I realized during the second viewing that I like so much about “Act 2” is not just its buoyant, energetic display — the playful, electric energy between Hiddleston and Basso as they surprise themselves and everyone else, and the beaming grin on Gordon’s face at this once-in-a-lifetime convergence — but the deeper significance of this moment in the arc of Chuck’s life in light of his “Act 1” coming of age.
Over and over the film reminds us of the celebrated line from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” This line resonates in one way with the apocalyptic events of “Act 3,” but in “Act 2” the Whitman quotation reminds us that while Chuck’s life has narrowed from the possibilities of his youth, those past versions of who Chuck was and might have been — the versions played by Cody Flanagan as a kid, Benjamin Pajak as a youth, and finally Jacob Tremblay as a young adult — are still part of who Chuck is. Taylor looks at Chuck and sees “Mr. Businessman.” He is Mr. Businessman, but he is more than that. Everyone we meet is more than they seem, though they seldom display it as dramatically as Chuck on that magical day.
Finally, in “Act 1,” King — a writer who knows his way around coming-of-age tales (The Body, adapted as Stand By Me) — dives into Chuck’s youth. Orphaned at 7, raised by his grandparents, Chuck learns music and dancing from his rock’n’roll grandmother Sarah (Mia Sara) and math from his hard-drinking accountant grandfather Albie (Mark Hamill). Often gratifying and never less than absorbing, this sprawling closing statement is more diffuse than the first two acts, and not everything quite comes together satisfyingly. Nick Offerman narrates rather too much of King’s prose, and does it with neither the sense of weary wisdom that Morgan Freeman brought to The Shawshank Redemption (another King adaptation) or the insinuating tones of Rod Serling.
Neither King nor Flanagan is as interested in numbers as music and dancing, and Albie’s poetic musings on the mathematics of the universe and saving lives through accounting never come to cinematic life like Taylor’s groove and Chuck’s moves. The locked room and the ghosts are introduced here, though we’ve seen the locked door before. (For those who have seen the film — and only for them — this locked-door connection perhaps momentarily raises questions about the ties that bind, and why, in “Act 3,” we find what might be considered a seemingly minor character inhabiting the most important house in the world. Or do many people inhabit this house, or versions of it, throughout the world? Perhaps we aren’t meant to think too hard about such questions. What happens in the Twilight Zone stays in the Twilight Zone.)
Albie connects the ghosts behind the locked door with the spirits of A Christmas Carol. This is a statement of intent from King, and from Flanagan: The Life of Chuck aspires to be a sometimes uncanny but ultimately uplifting paranormal parable very broadly in the tradition of Dickens’ beloved story. I think it’s closer in spirit to It’s a Wonderful Life: a story of a man whose youthful dreams fall by the wayside as he settles for a boring office job, but who is married to (and “scrupulously faithful to”) Q’orianka Kilcher’s Ginny, and who perhaps uses his boring job to improve people’s lives (though we never see this, as we do with George Bailey). Chuck’s showstopping school dance performance may be only the second most perfect dance of his life, but George Bailey probably lived a lot longer.
To the rhetorical question “Why did he die at 40?” Peter Kreeft offers a jarring counterpoint: “Why did he live to 40?” Is life a gift or isn’t it? Can a life cut short still be a wonderful life? The final verdict is given, not by Chuck, but by Chuck’s wife Ginny. One thing I think The Life of Chuck could have used: an “Act 1” scene in which young Chuck nearly dies, and someone saves his life. I wonder how this would be remembered from Marty and Felicia’s perspective. The Life of Chuck is not a very Jewish story, but someone could have been found to recall the wisdom of the Talmud about saving one life.
Copyright © 2000– Steven D. Greydanus. All rights reserved.