The Life of Chuck (USA | 2024 | 110 minutes | Mike Flanagan)
Told in three acts in reverse, Mike Flanagan has made a lovely little adaptation of a Stephen King novella that seeks to explain how Tom Hiddleston came to be an exceptional dancer who contains multitudes.
The film opens with an ominous first act that finds a town facing the end of the world. It’s easily the most spookily successful of the linked anthology, immediately setting an uneasy mood among the residents coping with the increasingly eerie circumstances. Vast swaths of California are falling into the sea, the Internet’s gone flaky, even Pornhub gone (the indignity!). Perhaps the strangest symptom of the end times is that in a small friendly town, strange billboards and ads are popping up everywhere. Incongruously and in an old-timey style, they congratulate an accountant named Charles Krantz for his “thirty-nine great years.” Despite the saturation of these ads, no one seems to have ever heard of this Chuck fellow. Is it a weird viral marketing campaign gone sideways, a message from above, or yet another symptom of the universe short-circuiting in its final moments. As these and other unsettling occurrences pile up, a hard-drinking primary school teacher played with resigned acceptance by Chiwetel Egiofor slowly comes to terms with the apparent last days by attempting to reconnect with his ex (Karen Gillan). The setup is so effectively haunting and the performances so swiftly realized that even the short story format creates a world, suffuses it with dread, and leaves us with a kind of grace.
In the next (“middle”) section, it’s an earlier, sunnier time. None of the looming anxiety, but a lot more of storybook narration. This slice of life finds a seemingly ordinary businessman (Hiddleston) taking an extended lunch break from a stuffy accounting conference on a warm day in Boston. There in the fresh-aired empty promise of a free afternoon, he strolls down Boylston Avenue and finds himself drawn to a busker drummer (Taylor Gordon) and a recently dumped bookseller (Annalise Basso). Together, they find a spontaneous connection in a town square. It’s a fleeting interaction, barely half a day. It’s no wonder that so much of the marketing hangs on this sequence. Flanigan and cinematographer Eben Bolter stage the sequence in 360-degree style, capturing the infectious energy that ripples among the the memory lasts a lifetime for all, including the viewing audience certain to be charmed by Tom Hiddleston’s moves.
The final (“first”) act then rewinds all the way back to the beginning of this dancing fool. We meet a young boy beset by familial tragedies who nevertheless finds a reason to twist and twirl while being raised by his grandparents. Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay play the younger versions of Hiddleston’s character with sweetness that never tumbles into cloying as they learn to dance and navigate adolescent anxieties. Mark Hamill, beneath a lot of old-man makeup and affecting a borderline heavy Northeastern Jewish accent, takes a turn as a stern but loving account who’s seen some dark things. It’s in this section that the film goes full treacle, leaning into the earnest sentiment and even more warm voiceover narration from Nick Offerman. The structure is such that each step back in time refracts what came before (or rather after in the titular life of Chuck), gifting new context to what we’ve already seen. With its elements of first crushes, adolescence, and the secrets of s forbidden attic, the tone swerves further into the YA realm. There’s nothing specifically wrong with that, but one could wish that the film left more to the audience and less to storybook explanations. I’m perhaps a smidge allergic to sentiment, the film won over Toronto audiences with TIFF’s top prize, making a surprisingly compelling case for embracing all of life’s possibilities and limitations.
An earlier version of this review was published when The Life of Chuck had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It has since been acquired by NEON. It is now playing in theaters everywhere, including a “share the love” promo by which those who purchase tickets through Fandango or AMC receive credits to send gift tickets to their friends and family.