If my years as a counselor have taught me anything, it’s that there is much more to every human being than we can possibly know.
However intimate a confidential disclosure may be, there is always more. More stories. More pain. And more joy. Every human being is a wonder, “unique and unrepeatable,” an unfathomable world containing “multitudes.”
This truth is vividly on display in the 2024 film The Life of Chuck, and if accolades like “life-affirming” and “joyful” (USA Today) seem strange when applied to a Stephen King film, you’re in for a pleasant surprise.
I say this because whenever I hear the name Stephen King, the first thing I feel is dread.
That’s what I felt as I stood in the dark outside the little country trailer where my husband and I lived when we were newly married. We’d just returned from seeing The Shining and knowing his practical joker streak well, I pleaded as he unlocked the door, “Don’t try to scare me tonight.” He didn’t.
We kept up with the Stephen King film canon for a while. The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile helped me realize his range was much deeper than I’d originally thought. Then I saw the trailer for 2017’s IT and well, it’s just not my cup of tea.
But The Life of Chuck shines, if you’ll pardon the terrible pun.
Still, you won’t be surprised that it contains an ominous thread.
The film opens in Act Three: Thanks Chuck!–and it jars us from the get-go. We see a high school classroom where a young man stands reading Walt Whitman while his classmates stare at their phones or out the window. A fire engine, horn blaring, races down the street.
Unphased, young man reads:
…The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future….
(I am large, I contain multitudes).
His classmates have good reason for their distraction, however. When their teacher, Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor), asks what’s so interesting, a wide-eyed girl informs him that earthquakes have just caused a “huge chunk” of California to fall into the ocean. Marty checks his phone and glimpses the California newsflash just before losing his signal. The internet has gone down. Traffic jams, sinkholes, reports of worldwide disaster on radio and television, conversations with anxious neighbors and coworkers follow in rapid succession. (Spoilers kept to a minimum, but some are necessary.)
A few days later, Marty’s ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gordon)–an emergency room nurse overwhelmed with suicide cases—calls Marty from her kitchen while nervously pouring a glass of wine. Though not religious, she’s wondering, as many others are, whether the world is in the throes of the End Times. “Fires and famines and plagues and all the rest,” she says. “It’s just…the center doesn’t hold.”
“The center cannot hold”–a perfect poetic contrast to Whitman’s spirited “Song of Myself.”
William Butler Yeats penned his foreboding The Second Coming in the dark years after World War I and the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. “Surely,” the poet declares, “some revelation is at hand”:
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
But before we can ponder the reference, everyone from Marty and Felicia to an undertaker (Carl Lumbly) Marty meets while walking to Felicia’s home has noticed strange advertisements on billboards, television, radio–even a skywriter–congratulating a man named Charles Krantz (a smiling middle-aged businessman at his desk) for 39 great years. They all end with a cheerful, “Thanks, Chuck!”
Without revealing how all this is connected, the next scene shows what’s really going on. A heart monitor is beeping; Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) is in the final moments of his life. His wife and teenage son are at his bedside, tears quietly streaming. Krantz, having lived only 39 years, is about to die.
And with that, we’re swept into into Act 2: Buskers Forever.
Here’s where the film begins to earn the words “joyful” and “life-affirming.”
The narrator (Nick Offerman) introduces us to three characters who are about to meet. Taylor (Taylor Gordon), a Julliard student who hasn’t told her parents that she’s earning a living “busking” on the street, is setting up her trap set at an intersection. Janice Halliday (Annalise Basso) is fuming down the street after receiving a breakup text from her boyfriend, and Charles Krantz himself, a “mister businessman” type, is walking back to his hotel following the afternoon session of his out-of-town business conference. This is a must-see even if you never watch the rest of the film:
Now, if that dance doesn’t make YOU want to say “Thanks, Chuck!” I don’t know what to tell you. The pathos in “come on, little sister” has made me tear up ever since. But you’ll have to see the rest of the film to understand why.
When his illness progresses and Chuck begins to lose his memories, the narrator tells us, he will remember this day from time to time, and he will think, “That is why God made the world. Just that.”
And then we move to Act 1 –“I Contain Multitudes.”
Here we discover that Chuck’s beginning was as dark as his end.
Chuck is orphaned at an early age when his father and mother (pregnant with a little sister they’ve already named Alyssa) die in a car accident. The little boy is taken in by his grandparents (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara) who are understandably lost in their own grief and have little strength for comforting a small boy.
But joy will return a year later when “Bubbie,” Chuck’s grandmother, recovers her zest for life while listening to rock and roll, swaying her hips as she cooks. She raises her hand in a disco move and, beckoning to Chuck, she smiles as she invites him: “Come on, little brother, let’s dance.”
What follows is so wonderful it must not be spoiled with a summary beyond this: A dark mystery lies in the home’s Victorian cupula, which Chuck’s “old school” accountant grandfather forbids him to enter. The prohibition naturally sets Chuck on a search for clues in the veiled details slowly slipping from the adults. Chuck (Benjamin Pajak) is now in his “wonder years” where, small and adorably nerdy, he amazes his middle school peers with dance moves he’s learned from his grandmother, all worthy of the future “Mr. Businessman.”
More important to his inner development, Chuck asks his “hippy dippy” teacher (Kate Siegel) the meaning of Whitman’s line “I contain multitudes,” and she interprets it for him in an unforgettable way.
We strain to grasp how the various strands in this story might come together, but the connections are incomplete in enough ways that many viewers, myself included, choose to watch this film a second time and are repaid for it. We may even find ourselves repeating, “I contain multitudes” long after the film is finished, because The Life of Chuck has helped us realize that we really do.
“Life can be filled with some nasty surprises, as most of us know,” Stephen King says in his introduction to the audiobook version of The Life of Chuck. “But, as most of us also know, every now and then something good happens.”
Laughing cynically, King jokes that the “jury is still out” on whether the good makes all the “crap” worthwhile, but adds that “watching the film, especially the transcendent last few minutes, may help you in that regard.”
Credit for that goes to screenwriter and director Mike Flanagan, especially for Act 3 and those “transcendent last few minutes” that leave us pondering not only the life of Chuck, but our lives as well. What can make an ordinary life “great”?
Who shines among the “multitudes” in our memories?
In these cynical times, I’d have expected more critics to pan this film as sentimental schmaltz, and some, of course, did. Perhaps Flanigan and King’s credibility–appreciated as they are by general audiences and horror fans–allowed The Life of Chuck to slip past the “watchful dragons” and enable viewers more used to seeing fallen heroes and psychopathology to celebrate the beauty in ordinary, good people. Like ourselves.
Confronted with the gut-wrenching sorrow in this movie (disasters, suicides, car accidents, orphaned children and Chuck’s own demise by aggressive glioblastoma) I was reminded that “Humankind cannot bear too much reality,” T.S. Eliot’s words in Four Quartets. Considering the way The Life of Chuck’s screenplay is constructed, the Quartets conclude quite fittingly:
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
Eliot, after a long search for meaning in the wasteland of Western civilization, came to a worldview more transcendent than the one presented in The Life of Chuck, even as he refused to flinch from stark suffering. I stand with him.
That said, if facing reality–as the film suggests–comes down to a choice between existential dread and existential wonder*, I’ll choose wonder.
We’re all little sisters and brothers in this Great Dance, and what better can we do than say yes to the invitation?
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You might also enjoy Resentment’s Destructive Power: Watching Oppenheimer while Reading René Girard and Wildcat was Worth the Wait.
*I owe this phrase to my son, “Big Ben Haslar,” on this episode of the Reels of Justice podcast. Thanks, Ben.
Have you seen The Life of Chuck? I’d love to hear from you!
How about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey? Want to read the book but need help? I did, and Close Reads, my favorite bookish podcast, came to the rescue when they covered Emily Wilson’s translation in 2019. Listen to the first episode here. Expert takes on the film abound right now. Two of my favorites are from Jessica Hooten Wilson, the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University, and Jason M. Baxter, the director for the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College.
Featured image courtesy of Pixabay.
