Doing the Math — The Life of Chuck
There are basically three types of story when it comes to movies adapted from the works of Stephen King. The first is intricate, metaphor-laden horror that can fascinate as well as terrify. This is where you get the likes of It, Carrie, and The Shining. The second is batshit insane horror and science fiction that border on dark comedy, not to be taken seriously at all (though they can still inspire a cheap thrill or two), such as Maximum Overdrive, Sleepwalkers, and Pet Sematary. The third, in a complete departure from the other two, is life-affirming human drama like Stand By Me, The Green Mile, and The Shawshank Redemption. While the volumes of output in each area differ, on balance, one third of his options are drastically different than the other two.
The latest release, the second of four this year (The Monkey came out in February, while The Long Walk is slated for September and Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man debuts in November), is The Life of Chuck. Firmly situated in the third category mentioned above, it’s a story that is in itself divided into three separate chapters, with the last being markedly different from the first two. That final chunk doesn’t quite live up to the quality of the others, making this essentially 2/3 of a great movie. A big reason that it falters in the final section is because, in a bit of unintentional irony, writer-director Mike Flanagan (who also helmed adaptations of King’s work in the forms of Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep) tries so hard to entangle fantastical escapism with cold, hard logic that the final product can’t become more than the sum of its parts.
In an intriguing subversion, the story is told in three acts, but in reverse order, meaning we start with “Act Three.” Messing with linearity takes some skill, and it’s very hard to get right, with Christopher Nolan being the clear master ever since Memento, but it can still be done effectively without going hardcore. Flanagan does take an interesting approach here, beginning at the end with a vignette entitled “Thanks, Chuck.” Pointedly, we don’t see our title character, played by Tom Hiddleston, until over a half hour into the proceedings. Instead, the focus is on Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a teacher who’s more wistful for the analog age than others, along with his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan), a nurse in an increasingly dire hospital. A series of natural and technological disasters have taken place all around the world. Earthquakes, volcanoes, typhoons, floods, and all manner of catastrophes have devastated the masses, and to make matters worse, there’s no internet service anywhere. The only signs of anything resembling normal, modern civilization are billboards and other advertisements congratulating Charles Krantz on “39 great years.” Across all forms of fading media, this tribute to a single man’s retirement is simultaneously the only sense of tangible joy in Marty and Felicia’s town and an ever-expanding source of dread.
It’s pretty easy to see what all this means as things play out, but the presentation is extraordinary, with some really well-placed sound effects and lighting tricks, both practical and digital. When stars literally blink out of the sky, you know what’s about to happen, but the buildup has made the trip more than worth the more trite moments, like Carl Lumbly saying “It’s the waiting… it’s the hardest part,” which begs you to break out in Tom Petty karaoke, or the fact that despite several phone calls and various farewells, somehow no one tells Gillan, “Bye, Felicia.” There’s an imbalance of corn, and it’s not just in your cinematic snack bucket, but you don’t care. There’s a deft tenderness to what Flanagan’s doing here, aided incredibly by the performances (including Matthew Lillard, which I never would have guessed was possible after the Scooby-Doo flicks) and Nick Offerman’s golden-throated narration. Just like Shawshank before it, Offerman’s presence is the exception that proves the rule when it comes to this form of exposition. Morgan Freeman made it beautiful 30+ years ago, and Offerman does similar yeoman’s work here. Normally this would be heavy-handed and far too much “telling” rather than “showing,” but given the plot threads at play here and the overall thematic thesis, it more than makes sense. Honestly, if taken completely on its own, this third/first act would make for an Oscar-worthy short film.
Act Two, “Buskers Forever,” is a delightful slice of life, as Chuck, now established as an accountant, has a spontaneous moment of joy. While on break from a corporate retreat, he walks around Boston and finds a street drummer (Taylor Gordon, credited under her stage name, “The Pocket Queen”) who, upon noticing him, changes up her style and tempo. Rather than it being just a passing moment, Chuck sets his briefcase on the ground and begins dancing, eventually drawing a crowd and inviting a young woman (Annalise Basso) to join him in a sequence of pure movie magic. Perfectly shot and edited, this high point for our protagonist is also the high point of the entire film, easily one of the greatest single scenes of the year to date. The first/final chapter, “I Contain Multitudes,” gives us all the proper context for everything we’ve just witnessed, centered on Chuck’s life as an adolescent (mostly Benjamin Pajak, with Jacob Tremblay taking over for the last 10 minutes), where he learns his love of dance and his fondness for numbers from his grandparents (Mia Sara and Mark Hamill, respectively).
It’s kind of hard to parse these backwards installments of the story, mostly because the caliber of the work decreases with each one. As I said, the opening 35 minutes alone are worthy of numerous accolades, while the middle block is genuinely fun and a tremendous bit of infectious positivity, though it has little to do with the plot arc. Together, they’re a much-needed placebo for a lot of the crap we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, even when things are going pretty well. For those of us experiencing a particularly depressing run at the moment (myself included), it can almost feel as if the characters are speaking directly to you. There’s existential fear, a sense that the world is literally and figuratively falling apart around you, and as the film itself so eloquently states, “everything’s going down the drain and the best we can say is, ‘it sucks.’” The matter-of-fact acknowledgement of such hopelessness, and the fatalist nature of the struggle to simply keep on, is all too real right now.
That hits hard, but the film is also quick to remind you of the beauty within these moments of pain and exultation. I understood what was happening in “Act Three” pretty quickly, mostly because Link’s Awakening is my favorite Zelda game, and the clues are clearly there. But even if you don’t have such an esoteric mental connection, the inclusion of Carl Sagan and Cosmos does help contextualize things and give wonder to the sophistry, even if it is a bit clunky to compress the “Cosmic Calendar” scale into a doomsday analogy. When it comes to the impromptu dance number, obviously not everyone has seen or felt something exactly like that, but I’m willing to bet that most if not all of us have experienced a crystallizing moment where everything seemed to make perfect sense, where the whole world was in sync, even if it was just for a few seconds. Whether that moment expressed itself in a tangible way is neither here nor there. It’s that the emotion is properly conveyed, which Hiddleston et al do masterfully. It’s not really nostalgia baiting, because the feeling could have manifested in any number of ways. You never know when that spark is going to happen, but just like that perfect first bite of Ratatouille that sent the food critic back to his mother’s rustic kitchen, you know it when you see it, even though by its very nature it has to take you completely by surprise.
Once we’ve taken in all this heady material, however, the remaining 50 minutes is just… serviceable. It’s good to know exactly how Chuck learned to dance, why he gets that sense of euphoria from it, and why he eventually became an accountant rather than a professional performer, because Sara and Hamill’s performances fill in the missing pieces to make Chuck a fully-realized character. All that works just fine, even if there is a sort of ham-fisted supernatural element that includes Hamill being an alcoholic using booze to suppress a lifetime of pain (somehow the only King cliché that makes an appearance, as there’s only a red herring reference to bullying and the film doesn’t appear to be set in Maine at all).
Where things drop off is in the almost mechanical way the script tries to connect everything back to the later stages of Chuck’s life. It plays more like a checklist rather than a natural flow, and yet it finds time to include some very odd side tangents like the boy somehow being the only one in his school to have ever seen, heard of, or learned the Moonwalk dance (with no mention of Michael Jackson by name, curiously). Act Three opened with a student reading Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” in class, so now a teacher has to do the same thing. Lumbly and Ejiofor have to show up in retroactive cameos to justify their inclusion in the earlier scenes. By the second or third time you see this, you just start counting off everything left to resolve. When will Chuck enter his house’s cupola (I learned a new word!)? How will “Gimme Some Lovin’” come back into play? Is the presence of Heather Langenkamp a backdoor way to make this a horrifying nightmare after all? We get all the answers, even the ones we don’t necessarily need or want, and there’s no finesse to it. Mostly it just feels too clever by half and at times cloying.
This wouldn’t be so noticeable were it not for one of the more pivotal scenes of this final section of the tale. Hamill’s character, a career accountant, convinces Chuck to essentially follow in his footsteps by giving him a speech about how math is itself an artform, one that can never lie or manipulate. Whether it’s finding a tax loophole or setting the time signature to the very music and dance that Chuck loves, nearly everything in the universe can come back to mathematics. “I wish schools taught us that, instead of the boring stuff,” Chuck responds, and he’s got a point. Trust me, my mother was an accountant. Had there been any effort on her part or those of any level of my schooling, I might have chosen the financial world for my own career path, and I’d probably be in a much more stable situation. There’s definite intellectual value in what’s being said here.
It just doesn’t mesh with what we’ve seen for the 90 minutes prior to this. If mathematical certainty and logic are ingrained into Chuck in such a way, then a whole host of new questions are posed but left unanswered. For instance, why do we see a star go out in the night sky, followed immediately by the planet Mars? Given what Chuck knows about Sagan’s work and all the math knowledge he’s gained over the years, surely he knows how light travels, and such a timely dimming would be impossible. How are memories affected, but still treated as fact? How can people who only have the thinnest of connections to Chuck’s life play such a major role at the end?
There are fascinating things that the sciences can show us, aided by the fact that the numbers are constant. However, that doesn’t translate 1:1 to whimsy itself. Our imaginations have to take what they’re given and run with it, sometimes in ways that are completely illogical. Perhaps if those ideas were properly conveyed rather than treating a girl on roller skates as a self-contained Easter Egg, we could have seen the compatibility of Hamill’s assertions with how Chuck’s life ultimately plays out. Instead, we’re basically told that everything has a logical explanation, and then we’re shown a bunch of stuff that has none.
I can see where this might come off as extremely frustrating for some viewers, to have some moments that seem absurd on the surface be eventually paid off satisfactorily while others are rendered even more consternating. At the same time, though, The Life of Chuck definitely leans more into the “emotional storytelling” side of the narrative equation, so for the most part, I can forgive the inconsistencies, because the moments that are supposed to hit you in the proverbial feels do exactly that. I just kind of get lost in the weeds (or “Leaves of Grass” if we want to be all meta about this) when we’re then meant to go back over those affecting instances in a way that demonstrates our intellectual superiority while somewhat pompously repeating the self-serving refrain of “multitudes” that can’t be properly defined.
Grade: B+
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Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on June 15, 2025.
