Tom Hiddleston Dances to the Dread Syncopation of the Ticking Doomsday Clock in Stephen King Adaptation
DIRECTED BY MIKE FLANAGAN/2025
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and Chuck feels fine. Actually he doesn’t, but we don’t find that out until later. Apocalyptic disaster abounds. As reports pour in about chunks of California breaking off into the sea and the American Midwest burning into oblivion and Florida going underwater, posters and advertisements proclaiming thanks to one Charles Krantz for “39 great years” appear everywhere. “Thanks, Chuck!”, they say. And before long, everyone else is saying it too. No one knows who this Chuck is or what the thirty-nine years is in reference to, but one thing’s for sure: even amid global catastrophe and all Hell breaking loose (entirely off screen, mind you), massive media buys remain possible.
In this three-act story, we begin at the living end, with Act Three. Chiwetel Ejiofor is beleaguered schoolteacher Marty Anderson, someone old enough to not be rattled to his very core when the internet goes away, but not so old that he can’t run across town to his ex-wife, Felicia (Karen Gillian) when the end is truly nigh. It turns out that he and Felicia still share a connection. Marty is, for all intents and purposes, the film’s main character. Until he’s not. He, like everything else in the oblique and vaguely oneiric Act Three, is simply gone once the movie moves on.
Welcome to Act Two. Unlike the darn-near insufferable Act Three, Act Two begins to settle into something a bit more approachable, a bit less forced-odd. The ubiquitous smarmy narration (which is apparently composed of direct passages from the 2020 Stephen King short story on which this film is based) that dominates The Life of Chuck’s opening third, courtesy of a thoroughly miscast Nick Offerman, is largely jettisoned, thank God. Act Two is less weird than Act Three, which, in the grand dichotomy of “good weird” and “bad weird”, is far too “bad weird.” As we finally meet the nebbish Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) as he simply walks to work one day, it’s evident that the distractingly Truman Show-level of artifice of this world is one thing we seem to be stuck with. The question is, why? Why did director Mike Flanagan (no stranger to adapting King, having already tackled Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game) see fit to work his set dec department to the point of emulating the spotless and freshly painted world of Paddington?
On his commute, a drumming street musician’s sweet beats catches Chuck’s attention. He stops, something long suppressed obviously triggered in him. And just like that, we’ve got one of the best cinematic dance numbers of the year. As the drummer drums, Chuck and his dance partner, Janice (Annalise Basso)- otherwise a stranger to him but not to us- rightly draw a crowd, their impromptu performance unifying the street corner for one brief pulsating time. The life of Chuck, nor The Life of Chuck, will not be this good ever again. He is, we learn, terminally ill.
In Act One, we learn why Chuck had all the right moves. By this point, the movie’s unbalanced cocktail of heavy-handed aesthetic, understated performances, long winded Big Ideas, and reverse narrative is making itself a lot clearer. Maybe too stupefyingly clear, swinging too far out of its way to explain itself heretofore. The Act Three Carl Sagan theories espoused at length by both Ejiofor and Carl Lumbly (on how the cosmic calendar demonstrates the insignificance of humankind in the greater scheme of the cosmos, stating that if all the universe’s history could be distilled to one calendar year, the full existence of humanity spans only the final 90 minutes on December 31) becomes more justified. At the same time, youthful Chuck (Benjamin Pajak and later Jacob Tremblay) learns that he contains multitudes. Not that he’s special or anything. We all contain multitudes- at least, that is, according to poet Walt Whitman.
It’s the last minute of the last day of school, and everything in the classroom is descending into chaos. Talking, spitballs, kicking… all manner of standard schoolroom raucous. Amid this, the poor teacher persists in reading the Whitman poetry of multitudes aloud. Only Chuck hears the words, pearls of unlikely inspiration in a cosmic calendar microcosm. In this, we are meant to derive a miraculousness among the mundane, and that we ourselves are the pearls in the dark terminal unforgiving expanse, lest we simply take a minute to focus on that. Or some such.
His free-spirited grandmother (Q’orianka Kilcher, who not so long ago played young Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s The New World, but now is playing an old lady?) teaches him the love of movie musicals and to dance. His curmudgeonly grandfather (Mark Hamill) teaches him the practicality of math, and that in its ridged practicality, math is art. All that’s missing in these moments (of which the film is built out of) are some mental POVs of A Beautiful Mind equations wondrously appearing everywhere. In their old farmhouse, Chuck’s grandparents raise him this way. (Because, like so many heroes, his parents are dead). We get it: the conflation of math and dance, combined with a strange blast of ghostly paranoia regarding the house’s locked-off attic (the door to which his grandfather insists never be opened), make Chuck the unassuming accountant we know he becomes.
Although Flanagan’s film is something of a big swing, though its scope is almost aggressively contained. In that, it’s not unlike a student film pained to prove it intellectual chops with extremely limited resources. Except, Flanagan isn’t bound by such extremely limited resources- it only seems like it. Sometimes The Life of Chuckreminded me of Mike Mill’s far greater balance of beauty and blah, the woefully under-seen 20th Century Women (2016). Sometimes it reminded me of The Truman Show (1998) and A Beautiful Mind (2001)- all of which are better movies (even A Beautiful Mind) than this earnest but rickety contraption. There are those who will find enlightenment and/or validation in this (amid the bleak, catastrophic and chaotic here and now), and God bless ‘em for that. I, though, found much of it to be like nails on an old classroom’s chalkboard.
Per the Offerman readings, King’s “The Life of Chuck” might just be worthwhile short story. But as a film, it strains and strives to its inevitable end, never satisfying its own grand equations of containing multitudes while dancing towards doomsday. Thanks anyway, Chuck.
