One Thing I Like About The Life of Chuck

My favorite moments in The Life of Chuck are in the scene when the world ends, and I don’t consider that a spoiler. It’s simultaneously wonderfully fantastic, ominous, and so grounded, with near-flawless performances from Karen Gillan and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The full weight of the entire story rests on that scene, and the movie nails it.

Which is a relief, since I think The Life of Chuck spends its entire running time walking a tightrope over a chasm of either apocalyptic nihilism or overly maudlin, Forrest Gump-style sentimentality. I thought there were several moments when it stumbled, threatening to go over the edge, but in the end, it made it. And delivered a tasteful and understated flourish.

For me, most of those stumbles were due to the narration. The movie was written, directed, and edited by Mike Flanagan, adapting a novella from Stephen King’s collection If It Bleeds. So periodically, we get extremely King-sounding descriptions delivered by Nick Offerman. (I haven’t read the book, but I wouldn’t be surprised if entire passages were lifted directly). The casting and the performance are as good as they can be, with Offerman reading everything with his very recognizable tone; I can easily imagine it’s the tone that King had in mind when he was writing it. It’s blunt and matter-of-fact, giving everything an edge that keeps it from becoming too maudlin, but is also just flippant enough to remind you that it’s not a horror story. This is one of the life-affirming ones.

So my issue with it isn’t the performance, but the choice to have it at all. I hate narration in adaptations of literary works, because it just feels like the filmmakers throwing up their hands and taking the easier way out. It feels clunky but acceptable when it’s just giving exposition like characters’ names and backgrounds. It veers into the annoying when it jumps in to describe exactly what a character is thinking or feeling in a particular moment, instead of trusting the performances to get the point across.

But even that is part of the one thing I like the most about The Life of Chuck — do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself — which is that I overwhelmingly got the sense that this was a very heartfelt, sincere, and personal project from Mike Flanagan. I know enough about him to know that he loves cinema and that he’s a big fan of Stephen King, so it’s very easy to imagine that he included passages of narration when he thought that the author had described the character or the moment perfectly.

One scene that I thought worked exceptionally well: Kate Siegel, who I believe has collaborated on every one of Flanagan’s projects (and is married to him), plays a “hippie-dippie” teacher who had a particularly strong influence on young Charles. She’s talking to him about a passage from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, explaining it to him in the way that the best teachers do, by first asking him what he thinks it means. She then delivers what is more or less a monologue — there are too many scenes in this movie of characters delivering monologues to each other — about the concepts behind the poem’s most famous lines, which also happen to be the central concept behind the movie.

But it doesn’t come across as stilted, since Siegel delivers it in the character of someone who loves teaching a student who’s eager to learn. And when Charles asks a question that pertains to death, a subtle but unmistakable change of expression comes over her face. In a split-second, the character has gone from the prepared performance of a teacher who’s excited to share with a student a work that she’s read dozens of times, to suddenly realizing that the conversation has turned to a darker subject she wasn’t prepared for. It felt like such a genuine moment — and a particularly appropriate one, as she realized there was more going on in Charles’s head than she’d anticipated — that I was glad it wasn’t ruined by a narrator telling us what she was feeling.

And more than that, seeing Siegel show up in one of Flanagan’s projects and turn any size performance into an unforgettable one was another reminder of what a personal movie this must’ve been. The Life of Chuck contains multitudes of the people Flanagan loves and loves working with, including Siegel, Gillan, and Rahul Kohli. It feels very much like someone taking a book he loved and making a movie with a bunch of his friends, where his friends happen to all be outstanding actors. And also he’s got access to a huge marketing budget, including skywriters.¹Yes, seeing “Thanks Chuck” written in the air across the Valley, multiple times, has been weird. Another surprisingly impactful moment comes from Matthew Lillard, who’s matter-of-factly talking about the end of the world and suddenly, realistically, bursts into tears.

In addition to politics, public civility, and the confidence of being able to post vacation photos online without having to crop out any bare feet, another thing that the internet has ruined is AMC’s Screen Unseen program. They’ll sell reduced-cost tickets for a “mystery film” that has yet to open in theaters, giving you only the MPAA rating and the runtime.²And the security of knowing you’re not unwittingly walking into a horror movie, since those are sold as “Scream Unseen.” I liked the idea of going into a movie not knowing what it was going to be, but a quick internet search for the logistics — for instance, I was wondering whether there was a review embargo like there is for industry screenings — almost immediately gave away what the movie was going to be. So I’d already been preparing myself for a life-affirming tearjerker, which might be a significant part of why The Life of Chuck didn’t completely bowl me over.

(Also: I’d imagined that a mystery movie would attract exclusively Lovers of Cinema, who appreciate the art form so much that they’ll pay to see an unknown movie just for the promise of enchantment in the theater. Apparently, the reduced ticket price is a bigger draw for people who are bored and will watch just about anything. There was a group of douchebags in the front rows of my screening who kept turning their phones on throughout the movie, either to check the time or to engage in full-on text message conversations in blinding white light. I mention this only because this was the worst movie for it. Here I was watching an often-moving story about the interconnectedness of all mankind and how each of us contains a fully-realized universe of life experience, and I just kept thinking how I had absolutely nothing in common with those drooling morons).

I liked The Life of Chuck but didn’t quite love it, but I should say this: I’d been watching it all analytically, enjoying it well enough and appreciating its best moments, but was left surprisingly unmoved by it. Surprising because I’m so easily manipulated by movies; to paraphrase MST3K: “he’ll cry at the opening of a bank!” And it did make me start sobbing in the car on the drive home, so I don’t want to give the impression that it didn’t work on me at all. But I liked it most as the work of a filmmaker I like a lot, along with a lot of his frequent collaborators, sharing something heartfelt and genuine that they loved.

• 1
  Yes, seeing “Thanks Chuck” written in the air across the Valley, multiple times, has been weird.
• 2
  And the security of knowing you’re not unwittingly walking into a horror movie, since those are sold as “Scream Unseen.”