The ordinary is extraordinary in ‘The Life of Chuck’

The Life of Chuck is a trick It s a trick you ll be delighted by but a trick nevertheless conjured by author Stephen King on the page and filmmaker Mike Flanagan on screen Of subject if you ve read the source material a novella published in as part of the collection If It Bleeds you ll know what s afoot as Flanagan doesn t stray from King s structural play or themes But if you go in fresh with wide eyes and an open heart it s like watching a bubble grow bigger and bigger before it pops suddenly with a sense of surprise and wonder Attempting to maintain that sense of surprise for a viewer makes the film extraordinarily laborious to write about even though it s a film about an ordinary life and the solutions that all ordinary lives are in their own tactics extraordinary It s extremely apt that one King adaptation The Monkey by Oz Perkins is about accepting death in all of its randomness and horror while the other The Life of Chuck is about finding the meaning and satisfaction in life These two films represent the multitudes contained in King s work the yin and yang of his point of view that the sweetness of life that can only be appreciated with the inevitability of death And because this is King the sentimental message of The Life of Chuck is wrapped in an existentially unsettling narrative The Life of Chuck is presented in three acts I Contain Multitudes Buskers Forever and Thanks Chuck Throughout we get to know Charles Krantz Tom Hiddleston who starts out as a man of mystery During a period of apocalyptic turmoil Marty Chiwetel Ejiofor a tutor and his ex-wife Felicia Karen Gillan a nurse are befuddled by the proliferation of numerous billboards advertisements and TV ads thanking Charles Krantz Chuck for great years In a time of cosmically terrifying strife these sunny messages are a strange anomaly that both distract from and call attention to the crumbling of society around them It s something to focus on other than the horrors This act Thanks Chuck is rattling What Marty and Felicia and everyone around them are experiencing is the kind of slow-moving apocalypse that feels all too familiar It s the mundanities the small indignities and the sheer weirdness of the universe rending itself apart that impacts their lives the the majority the traffic the internet being down for months the suicides That it comes first is crucial because it casts a pall over the proceedings even as the rest of the film soothes the nervous system What Flanagan and King do is a sort of slow sleight of hand that mimics the emotional journey of Charles Krantz If you know the world is going to end how do you live your life Do you dance in a town square to the beat of a busker drumming pulling in a dance partner and putting on a show the way Chuck does Or do you let the worry and pain of knowing that it s all going to end someday eat you alive Chuck argues that knowledge is a life-affirming power while in its evil twin The Monkey it was the not knowing that caused the characters so much anguish Knowing empowers us to live more brighter bigger to embrace every single one of our multitudes whether it s dance or math or whatever makes us feel alive This is the lesson that Chuck learns while he s growing up played over the years by Cody Flanagan Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay Like several a King child protagonist he is all-too familiar with death having lost his parents in a car wreck Grief takes over the life of Chuck and his grandparents until one day his grandmother Mia Sara decides to cast it off She teaches Chuck to dance in the kitchen and shows him movie musicals After her sudden death he joins the Twirlers and Spinners at school progressing his skills and the gumption it takes to get up and dance So is The Life of Chuck a movie about the power of dance Kind of But it s also so much more than that It contains multitudes after all just like Chuck and just like every person walking this earth little galaxies and universes of people and stories and memories unto themselves Flanagan s trick is solely how he imparts this eternal lesson to us we know life will end so how you spend the time is all that matters It s simple and it may be delivered in a way that s a bit too clever by half but it s still a gut-punch and a message worth absorbing now and reliably Tribune News Institution The Life of Chuck contains language THE LIFE OF CHUCK Rated R At the AMC Boston Common and Coolidge Corner Theatre Grade A-