If no one had told me, I would have no clue that The Life of Chuck was such a big deal. Adapted from a short story by Stephen King, the…ahem…”life-affirming” (stop using that word, marketing departments!) film directed by Mike Flanagan won the People’s Choice Award at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. Historically, that award has been the best early predictor of Oscar glory. Now, the movie’s out in theatres, and I’m still not sure that it’s a big deal.
I’m going to want to spoil the plot for you so that I can tell you things that I think will be helpful when watching it…but this is a movie all about the mystery, and so spoilers would be especially egregious. So…in the most basic terms, the movie is told in three acts, beginning with Act Three and moving backward. Each act is very different than the others, and each has its charms, but I am not sure that their powers combined make a complete film.
Chuck is played by four actors, each at a different stage of his life. Tom Hiddleston gets top billing, but he’s hardly the star of the movie. A child actor (the director’s son?) shows up in one shot as young Chuck. At age ten, he is played by Broadway wunderkind Benjamin Pajak, and at eighteen, he is briefly played by Jacob Tremblay (who looks like he’s made out of porcelain; it was distracting). One big kudo goes out to the casting director for making all the Chucks really, truly look like the same person.
Aside from the titular character, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan are excellent as the stars of Act Three. Act Two kind of belongs to…this is her name, y’all…The Pocket Queen. But in Act One, Chuck’s grandparents steal the show. Though they are both very famous actors, I did not recognize either of them while watching the movie. In the best performances of the film, Mia Sara (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and Mark Hamill (…you know who he is) make you leave the film wondering why it’s named for this Chuck character. They’re both excellent. You can also enjoy spotting Nick Offerman’s voice, Matthew Lillard, David Dastmalchian, Molly C. Quinn, and Q’orianka Kilcher (so happy to see her back twenty years after The New World).
As the noisy people behind me clearly misunderstood the entire movie, can I give you some cryptic clues to help you avoid their fate? Please note that Chuck is the only character who ages. Please pay attention when the director’s wife (who looks distractingly like Katy Perry) explains Whitman’s “Song of Myself” to Pajak-Chuck. And listen to Tremblay-Chuck’s last lines, even if they are delivered blandly and overpowered by the music.
My main takeaway as the credits rolled was that half of the movie was missing. It felt like no more than an hour had passed (after two hours of commercials and red band trailers for horror films!). For a film that is trying to encompass so much and say some very big things (which I really want to reveal to you), it feels very slight. Good…but slight. It feels like an episode of a high-end anthology series—not like a full film.
So, while there really is a lot to love (foremost the sharply drawn characters), The Life of Chuck seems like a long way from an Oscar frontrunner. But, then again, the award this year will most likely go to a film that either wallows in the terror of our current world or blithely dances around it. The Life of Chuck is clearly in the latter category.