A number of years ago—I, hilariously, can’t remember precisely when—I had a dream in which the people I was dreaming about realized that they were dreams, that they only existed in my mind, and that when I woke up, they’d wink out. This sent them in to a screaming panic.
I tried so hard not to wake up.
Does the fact that I remember them, not as individuals but as that screaming mob, mean they still exist? Do they only exist in that state of panic? Or does the fact that I remember them at all grant them some sort of afterlife in a dusty corner of my head? Just what are my responsibilities here?
I like to think I’d be a merciful god.
But then, I suppose we’d have to get super granular on the meaning of mercy, wouldn’t we?
This is to say that Life of Chuck is life affirming in a really fascinating way. I’m going to give you a rundown of the themes but avoid spoilers. I think this is a beautiful film, very different tonally from any of Mike Flanagan’s other films and TV series. It’s delicate and exuberant and achingly sad. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if this became the kind of film that people sit down to finish if they happen across it while flipping channels, or the kind of film that people use to mark special occasions. Flanagan adapted the film from the short story also titled “The Life Of Chuck”, which was included in Stephen King’s anthology If It Bleeds in 2020.
While technically Chuck grows up in a rickety old haunted Victorian house, this is Stephen King in Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption gear—there are no scary clowns or zombie pets or jumpscares here. The horror, if you want to call it that, is the horror that comes with life: people get sick, people give up on their dreams, we’re all gonna die. The usual stuff.
But to be clear, the rickety old Victorian is objectively haunted.
It feels silly to even talk about the performances, as they’re all perfect. Perfect in that I was completely absorbed watching the film, and it only really hit me just how good everyone is later on in the evening. This is the best Tom Hiddleston’s been since Only Lovers Left Alive. His three younger counterparts, Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak, and Jacob Tremblay, all give nuanced turns that mesh incredibly well with each other. Chuck feels like Chuck at every age. Flanagan has chosen to give us the ‘80s icons Mia Sara and Heather Langenkamp in roles that are warm, human, and deeply funny. David Dastmalchian gets a fun scene; Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan are heartbreaking as, essentially, co-leads for the first part of the film; we finally get to see Matthew Lillard in a role that, while brief, is worthy of his charm. (Sidenote: if you’ve never seen the otherwise not great Thirteen Ghosts, Matthew Lillard’s fucking amazing in it.) Samantha Sloyan gets a break from being the most evil person in any Flanagan project. And Mark Hamill continues the renaissance that began with The Last Jedi, and this time gets to dig into the role of a three-dimensional human who loves his family and wants to do right by them. That’s it. No flashy retro nods, no streak of dark hilarious evil like in The Fall of the House of Usher. He’s Chuck’s grandpa (Chuck thinks of him more with the Yiddish term zaide), and he’s a real person. It’s so nice to watch Hamill just embody a person.
If you’re like me, and you’re paying attention to the world and the news and the climate and and and, the first fifteen minutes of this are either going to feel like a warm hug—or send you screaming out of the theater.
We meet Marty Anderson (Ejiofor) and Felicia Gordon (Gillan) in a world that seems to be falling apart. Suicides are up—until they abruptly stop because people don’t want to bother anymore. Couples are getting divorced, but more are getting married. People are walking off their jobs, because everywhere you turn there are fires and bridge collapses and society-ending weather events, so what’s the point? Better to have fun or seek connection with those you love. In the face of calamity, these people hold it together remarkably well, with Marty sharing a moment of connection with Gus Wilfong (Lillard), and later walking and talking with Sam Yarbrough (Carl Lumbly) as he goes to find Felicia.
It makes for a lovely but unsettling start to a film—but of course this is mostly the story of Chuck.
We meet him as an adult, on what turns out to be a particularly lovely day for him when he meets a busker named Cat (Taylor “Pocket Queen” Gordon) and shares a dance with a woman named Janice Halliday (Annalise Basso), then the film skips around through his childhood years with his grandparents Albie and Sarah Krantz (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara) in that haunted Victorian. There’s a lot of sadness in their lives, but they also, gradually, let the light back in, too. The one real hard rule in the house is that Chuck is never to go up into the cupola at the top of the old Victorian house. So guess what Chuck wants more than anything? And guess what causes something of a ripple effect in his family’s life?
But even that isn’t the point.
The point is that Albie and Sarah let the light back in despite their grief. The point is that they do their best to shield him from that cupola.
This film is also, unexpectedly, a love song to math. Chuck and his grandfather are both accountants, and there are multiple… I’ll just call them soliloquies, about how math is beautiful, underlies everything, is the reason people love music and dancing—and, most of all, how it cannot lie. Which is true, in this whole world the two things you can’t bullshit are sports and math. They are also two things I am utterly incapable of doing.
One of the many things I love about this film—I love everything about this film—is that the the story doesn’t make the obvious link and make Chuck a stereotypical nerd, and it also doesn’t send him into sports as the paradoxical physical talent. He’s a dancer. A great dancer, natural and fluid and full of joy. It also doesn’t bother with popular boys versus unpopular boys, or bitchy girls, or any of the other cliches. The stakes are too high, here.
If The Life of Chuck has heroes, they are Carl Sagan and Walt Whitman in equal measure. Sagan’s measure tones and wonder at the cosmos echo through the whole film, and at times people remind Chuck, themselves, and the audience that we contain multitudes. And we do. Every single one of us, you reading this, me typing it, we are all whole worlds walking around on this world that we share.
It would have been easy to make this maudlin, but—hang on, do you know where the world maudlin comes from? It’s a slow evolution of the word “Magdalene”, because Mary Magdalene’s big trait, other than being incorrectly labelled as a sex worker (no shade to sex work, obviously, but she wasn’t a sex worker) was that between the crucifixion and the resurrection she cried a lot about her own redemption and about Jesus’ death. Eventually it came to imply emotion that was overwrought, hammy, maybe even performative. I’m pointing it out because I think it’s an interesting evolution—and maybe there is a little of that in the movie, the idea that somehow a woman’s honest response to her friend’s brutal death came to seem embarrassing rather than reasonable.
This movie is neither overwrought nor hammy, but it wants you to face up to your emotions honestly.
Flanagan ducks around this danger in one scene: the teacher who explains Whitman’s phrase about “containing multitudes” is the sort of stereotypical hippie English teacher that we all supposedly had in high school. The one who, if you were creative and/or queer, encouraged you and supported you and gave you shelter from the storm of adolescence. (This was not my experience.) What makes it special is that the movie makes it clear that this woman (Miss Richards, played by the ever-perfect Kate Siegel) is not a good teacher—she can’t control the class, she has no authority, she’s not going to gain the kind of clout that can allow her to protect the school outcasts. However, one-on-one with Chuck, she is that transformative teacher. Just because the kids don’t listen to her as a group, that doesn’t negate that she’s trying to give them some wisdom. And it’s clear that her moment with Chuck transformed the way he looked at life. All the facets are true.
As with all Stephen King, your mileage may vary. For me, I found the opening section of the film far scarier and more upsetting than anything in IT, either Pet Sematary, or Salem’s Lot. I was touched by the way Chuck kept coming back to dance as the way he found beauty in life, and I’m grateful that there’s a film in theaters right now that chooses to find beauty in life. It feels almost revolutionary to celebrate small moments of joy and life right now, and I’m glad Mike Flanagan and his players decided to give this story space on the dance floor.
The movie makes me feel warm. Although the beginning is a little bit stressful I left the movie theater feeling like someone has hugged me.