The TIFF People’s Choice Award is usually a bellwether to the Oscars, but this year the prize reflects rather more deep-seated global concerns among the voters than just the race to Best Picture. Based on the short story of the same name by Stephen King — one of the four in his 2020 novella If It Bleeds — The Life of Chuck is, as might be expected from the Master of the Macabre, a story of human mortality presented as a strange, surrealist comedy. Charlie Kaufman has done this before — twice, in fact, with Synecdoche, New York (2008) and I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) — but Mike Flanagan’s film will likely go down a little smoother, with a lightness that undercuts the overarching tragedy.
Flanagan introduced the world premiere at Toronto with a quote from King himself: “When an old man dies, a library burns down.” Its relevance is not immediately clear but will become so over time, just as the recurring image of a billboard paying tribute to Charles “Chuck” Kranz — an accountant (played by Tom Hiddleston) retiring after “39 great years” — will finally reveal itself in the third act (which is actually the first, since the film unfolds in reverse order). Equally surprising is the casting; though Kranz is the focus, and steals the film with an extended dance routine midway through, The Life of Chuck is an ensemble piece, narrated by Nick Offerman, and it’s arguable whether Hiddleston even has enough screen time to warrant a nomination come awards season.
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The first act is the third (“Thanks, Chuck!”), and it concerns schoolteacher Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who presses on with his job in the face of societal collapse, teaching Walt Whitman to a class still dealing with the loss of the internet (“Even Pornhub’s down,” a forlorn parent laments). There’s a sinkhole in the town center, California has all but fallen into the sea, and the Midwest has turned to charcoal. Marty watches it all with a kind of bemused detachment, checking in with his ex-girlfriend Felicia (Karen Gillan), a nurse overseeing so many deaths, her team has nicknamed itself “The Suicide Squad.” As life on Earth becomes increasingly perilous, Marty spots the first billboard, an image that will, quite literally, stay with him for the rest of his life.
Act Two, which is Act Two whichever way you cut it, is called “Buskers Forever” and is about the most we’ll get to see of the adult Kranz, who is attending an accountancy rally for the Midwest Trust titled “Conference Banking in the 21st Century.” His day is derailed, however, when a street drummer (Taylor Gordon) sets up a kit and starts to play (“The beat is your friend,” says the narrator, “and thinking is the enemy”). Kranz, passing by, is swept up by the sound and dances joyfully with a young stranger. As a coda, however, the narrator reveals something wholly unexpected that’s lurking in the near future.
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It all comes together in Act One (“I Contain Multitudes”), which delves into Kranz’s early life, from the time he was orphaned at age 7 and raised in his family home by his grandparents Albie and Sarah (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara). The young Chuck is a gifted dancer, joining the school dance club and teaching everyone to moonwalk, but Albie schools him on the more mundane practicalities of life, telling him, “The world loves dancers — but it needs accountants.” This final section also reveals what’s been going on in the first act, revealing the truth about Marty and why his life mirrors, so much, that of Charles Kranz.
The Life of Chuck takes a while to get where it’s going, and it might be a test of patience for the less imaginative to get there, but it does all build up to an impressively upbeat payoff, despite the underlying pathos of the scenario as a whole. Staying pretty faithful to King’s original text, Flanagan’s film is, likewise, a story of life rather than death, a kind of pop-culture version of Lars Von Trier’s 2011 end-of-the-world movie Melancholia. Its darkness might be an obstacle to immediate commercial success, but its underlying warmth and poignancy could well be its secret weapon on the way to cult longevity.
Title: The Life of Chuck
Festival: Toronto (Special Presentations)
Director-screenwriter: Mike Flanagan
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Matthew Lillard, Mia Sara, Carl Lumbly, Benjamin Pajak, Jacob Tremblay, Mark Hamill, Heather Langenkamp
Sales agents: WME; FilmNation Entertainment
Running time: 1 hr 50 mins