Film Review: The Life of Chuck

 

Sexuality/Nudity Mature

Violence Acceptable

Vulgarity Acceptable

Anti-Catholic Philosophy Mature

I heard a reviewer say that depending on where you are in life, this movie will hit you differently.

I wanted to put that here at the beginning in order to be fair to this movie and raise the possibility that with recent losses in my life that perhaps I was not in the right place to see it.

Because I thought that The Life of Chuck was a bad movie.

The story begins by focusing on Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is a high school English teacher trying to maintain normalcy while the world seems to be coming to an end.  Eight months earlier the internet went down and now only works sporadically.  Wars, famines, and all other kinds of natural disasters are plaguing the world as it slowly falls apart.  In these trying times, Marty tries reconnecting to his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillen), each looking to each other for some kind of comfort.  At the same time, everyone keeps seeing this messages saying "Thanks, Chuck.  39 Great Years" along with a picture of Chuck (Tom Hiddleston).  As things begin to fall apart even more, Marty tries to make it to Felicia.  Once this story resolves, we shift to a day in the life of Chuck when he decided to dance along to the music of a street musician.  After this, the story shifts once again to Chuck's childhood.  The young Chuck (Benjamin Pajak) suffers loss when his parents are killed in a car accident and he is sent to live with his grandfather (Mark Hamill) and grandmother (Mia Sara).  He is pulled between a life of dance and a life of accounting.  And there is a locked door in the house with a terrible secret.

If all of that feels like it doesn't fit together, that's because it doesn't.  Don't get me wrong, it could have.  One more scene at the end to tie everything together would have been enough.  But the movie thinks it is saying something profound and life-affirming, but it is most clearly doing the opposite.

The best thing I can say about the movie is that the performances are outstanding.  I honestly think that Hamill should get an Oscar nomination.  He gives a monologue about the beauty of math that may have convinced me to become an accountant.  Ejiofor and Gillen are wonderful as you can feel their existential terror slowly flooding over them.  Mia Sara does a great job of being the balancing and creative force of Chuck's life.  Hiddleston actually has very little to work with, but when he is on the screen, he is very effective.  Even Matthew Lillard has a small part where he gives a very nice performance along with Carl Lumbly.

I only wish the performances were in a movie that was worthy of them.

In order to fully explain the problem with the film, it will require SPOILERS.  I generally don't like to do that in a movie review, but it is the only way I can adequately explain what went wrong. So be warned:

SPOILERS FOR THE REST OF THE REVIEW

The movie deals with two high concept ideas: 

1. "I contain multitudes"

2. The Mystery Room of Death

Maybe if the movie had focused on one or the other, it would have worked.  But these two things to do not go together and they really have nothing to do with each other.  They never converge in anything close to catharsis.

Regarding the first idea, this comes from a time when young Chuck listens to his teacher read a Walt Whitman poem where he says "I contain multitudes."  This means that every person that Chuck has ever encountered or imagined exists in some way inside of him.  That's what the entire first act takes place in Chuck's mind.  Marty, Felicia, and everyone else are living in a universe of Chuck's mind.  Throughout the next two acts, the people of of the first act can be seen as background characters.  The movie is saying that when you encounter anyone, you make a little version of them inside of you that lives out an entire life.  But Chuck is dying of brain cancer.  The words, "Thanks, Chuck.  39 great years," are words that his wife (Q'Orianka Kilcher) says to him in his last moments.  The universe is ending because of Chuck.  

The Mystery Room of Death is about the locked room in his grandparents' house.  This movie is based on a Stephen King story and this is the most Stephen King-esque element.  The grandfather has a locked room where he sees people's deaths.  You learn this slowly over the course of the movie, but Chuck's curiosity gets the better of him in the end.  After both of his grandparents are dead, he goes into the room and sees himself dying from brain cancer.  He resolves to live life to the fullest and ends by saying, "I am wonderful.  I deserve to be wonderful.  And I contain multitudes."  

And that is where the movie ends.

This is supposed to be an uplifting message about seizing the day.  Instead, it reminds us that the multitudes in Chuck's mind end their existence in meaningless abject horror and then blink out of existence for no purpose.   There is a subtle implication that this is happening in all of us or that we ourselves might be part of that multitude inside someone's mind.  Rather than being life-affirming, it points us to the meaninglessness of life.  It implies that we are not beings of purpose and substance but random, purposeless chance.  

The characters in the first act are given no resolution.  Their existence is given no greater meaning by learning about Chuck's life.  In fact, Chuck's cancer itself plays out like a cruel, nihilistic joke.  The fact that Chuck knows he is going to die has no bearing on anything that happens in the entire story.  Does he live life to the fullest?  I mean... maybe?  We know he has a wife and child so that is something important.  But we never really get to see his life outside of his childhood and the one day he danced.  He doesn't seem all that happy as an adult, so I don't know what the ending is supposed to be saying.  

Notice too how the Mystery Room of Death adds nothing to the first act and the characters that you care about.  If Chuck knows his death or doesn't, it makes absolutely no difference.  The two ideas are so wildly unconnected that it feels like the movie would have been better served if they had taken one out and focused on the other.

And it's not that the movie had to find a super-fun-happy ending for the Act One characters.  But the movie never pays off its narrative debt.  What I mean is that it gives us characters to empathize with who are going through a crisis.  The story owes it to us to give us a proper resolution (even if it is an ambiguous resolution).  Instead, it leaves them in total darkness and expects you to forget about their fate by the time the movie ends.  It expects you to say, "Well, they weren't really real, so it doesn't matter."  But the movie made them real in Act One and you cannot remove their personhood from the audience.

The movie wants to say something about how life is about the moments of wonder.  And while that is absolutely a part of the magic of life, it ignores the need for purpose and meaning in order to make life worth living.

In the end, I honestly don't know if this was an intentional bait-and-switch, where we are promised It's a Wonderful Life and are instead given Melancholia or if the film makers honestly don't understand the nihilism that is poisoning their supposed optimism.  

Either way, I'd recommended avoiding The Life of Chuck.