Photo © Neon
Mark Hamill in The Life of Chuck (2024)
Mark Hamill in The Life of Chuck (2024)
Stephen King’s genius has always been for locating horror or the uncanny in the heart of here and now. No need to go looking for a manor on the English moors, much less a castle in Transylvania. All you need is the nearest leafy suburb or gritty blue-collar town.
Director Mike Flanagan (Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House”) faithfully adapted The Life of Chuck from King’s novella of that name, setting it in an unnamed midsize city, probably somewhere in the heartland. The three-act story starts at the end and works backward, but perhaps endings and beginnings are only relative to ordinary human perception. Has everything that will happen already happened?
What happens as The Life of Chuck opens is the world imploding around middle-school teacher Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor). It’s a bad news day to 10th power. Marty tries to explain to parents that even though the worldwide web is unraveling, his grades are backed up on paper. Google isn’t answering any longer? The school still has a library of books. His ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan), a nurse at a nearby hospital, is even more stressed as staff disappears, supply chains break and the monitors at the empty bedsides blip and hum as if connected to living patients.
Doom Scroll
The news of the day is one long doom scroll of riots, draughts, torrential rainfall, deadly sinkholes, collapsing bridges and yes, California riven by tectonic shifts and sinking fast, sending hundreds of thousands of refugees to Nevada. Marty takes comfort from old films on television until the signal falters. Only one message gets through the broadcast disruption—an ad depicting a mild-faced fellow captioned “Thanks, Chuck! For 39 Great Years.” Marty has seen that same ad on billboards and Felicia hears it on the radio. Their marriage seemed to have ended amicably enough, and in their desperation, they reach out to each other for support by phone.
So what in the world is going on and why is Chuck everywhere? Marty’s mechanic friend ascribes the global catastrophe to climate change. Sam the mortician, a science buff, thinks the Earth’s rotation has changed. Although neither Marty or Sam think they know who Chuck is, turns out Sam buried Chuck’s grandfather years earlier and Marty taught at Chuck’s school. Characters large and small weave in and out of the story’s three acts. Everything and everyone are interconnected.
Through many thoughtful and emotionally moving scenes, The Life of Chuck links together synchronicities, life choices and the usually unforeseen (but not unforeseeable) impact people have on each other. Introduced in act two, the adult Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) is an accountant raised by his grandparents (in act three) after his parents die in an accident. He wonders whether he was wrong for following the example of his accountant grandfather (Mark Hamill) rather than his free-spirited grandmother (Mia Sara). Could he have gone both ways? He was the only kid in his sixth-grade class who listened as the teacher recited Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” where the poet declares, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Could Chuck have contained multitudes and avoid the almost inevitable erosion of dreams that come with age? And was that failure to maintain multitudes such a bad thing if he positively touched the lives closest to his own? Chuck’s life is destined for tragedy, and so is the world, but that’s no excuse to stop living.
Accountants, Not Dancers
His grandmother taught him to dance, and he excelled at it in middle school, but is dissuaded by his grandfather. “The world loves dancers, but it needs accountants,” he told Chuck. Making an impassioned argument for studying numbers, grandfather called math an art, foundational to the universe even down to the rhythm of dance; math is pure, true and valuable. He told Chuck that he has saved the lives of clients from ruin by doing the math and tallying the figures.
Civilization's collapse in act one has many uncanny elements that loop back to a low-key note of suspense is maintained in act three over the mysterious room at the top of the stairs in grandparents’ Victorian house, the door padlocked, and Chuck forbidden to ever look inside. “It’s full of ghosts,” grandfather said, but are they the ghosts of the past or the future? What if we knew the fate that’s in store—whether for ourselves or the universe? “It’s the waiting that’s the hard part,” grandfather says.
Jump back to the final scene at the end of act one. The power grid has died, and the night sky is vivid. Marty and Felicia are holding hands in her backyard and watching as the stars are snuffed out one by one as everything ends.
