The Life of Chuck (2024)

Rated R, mostly for language, including a bit about porn that two people joke about.  There's also mass death off screen.  It's a lot of existential dread that leads to alcoholism.  If you are sensitive to people being cut, there's one shot that might make you wince.  But the thing that almost exclusively gets the film an R-rating is language.  

DIRECTOR: Mike Flanagan

I'm just so tired.  No part of me wants to write this blog.  I have things that I have to do and I don't want to do any of it.  But I have access to internet for an hour and, gosh darn it, I suppose I should take advantage of the time available to me.  It's my fault.  I went to bed too late and got up too early.  I'm a big dummy and I am obsessed with staying productive.  Here we go.

I read the short story.  I love me some Stephen King.  Honestly, people tend to crap on Stephen King a lot.  Sure, he's going through a bit of a renaissance, especially with the wealth of his works that are being adapted right now.  Pile onto that the fact that Mike Flanagan, Doctor Sleep himself, is adapting another Stephen King work --especially considering that Mike Flanagan is in the spotlight as well --and this movie should make sense.  I don't want to let my current grumpiness to color my blog about the film too much.  Overall, I really liked the movie.  I actually recommended it to people.  It's not that I don't find the value of the film.  But I also have to make peace with something that I don't want to make peace with:

Stephen King doesn't write reality.

For most of you out there, this is a "No, duh" element.  While The Life of Chuck isn't a horror movie, King himself is the most famous horror author out there.  He's written some absolutely bananas ideas.  I'm not really talking about that.  I'm talking about the grounded moments.  

I was shocked to find out that I was one of the few people who really liked The Long Walk.  I'm going to go on a limb and say that I am really forgiving of Stephen King's flaws.  He writes a fun yarn and I'll even go as far as to say that I like the dynamics and friendships that he creates in his stories.  It's just that his dialogue is almost Rockwellian in nature.  That is, if Norman Rockwell was a big fan of cussing.  

The Life of Chuck runs into some of the problems that The Long Walk did.  When you take Stephen King's novels and short stories and adapt the dialogue --and, if I'm honest, some of the moments --to the big screen, there are moments that don't quite feel real.  It's not that they aren't emotional.  Heck, a lot of the movie is aggressive emotional manipulation.  Like, it's thick.  It's a lot of red flags for me put into one movie.  But that being said, for the emotionally  vulnerable, it's some stuff that is meant to make you cry.  I, being a bit of a hard sell sometimes (when it comes to tearjerker films), might be a bit cynical --despite being the guy who preaches the value of emotional vulnerability.  

While there are a bunch of moments in The Life of Chuck that kind of prove my point, I want to focus on dancing.  A key motif in Chuck is the fact that Chuck dances.  It's actually one of the more recognizable elements in his very thin character (which is odd, considering that this movie is called The Life of Chuck).  Because the movie is told with non-traditional chronology, playing with the relationships between cause and effect, we see the big moment for Chuck as he, for reasons up to that point unknown, dancing publicly and with abandon.  I'll tell you, seeing Tom Hiddleston cutting a rug to a drumbeat in the middle of a square is mostly pretty effective.  I know that Hiddleston can dance.  He's done so on talk shows and he seems to have the moves.  When he invites a random girl who is mildly participating to join him in the dance, there's a little suspension of disbelief as the two pull off what looks to be a choreographed number in front of a bunch of people.  Still, we're in a movie and we have movie logic.  The beginning of the film even establishes a scope that is so epic and bombastic that a dance in the middle of the square seems like a slice of reality.  

But because this is a movie that inverts cause and effect, we see the moments that inspired Chuck to dance in the middle of square by showing us his childhood.  And there are some sweet moments that actually kind of work.  Chuck's relationship to his grandmother, who bonds with Chuck over musicals, teaches him (foreshadowed by moments in the dance when we see a woman throw her hand up to the beat) how to express himself through dance.  It's touching.  And then the emotional punches keep coming.  We learn that Chuck continued taking dance instruction as a way to memorialize his grandmother, which is all very sweet.  

But it's the fact that the movie really wants you to have this tearjerker moments is when I think my disbelief has been suspended too much.  The climax of the film is a young Chuck finally getting the gumption to do a very ornately choreographed dance to a song that he didn't pick with a girl with whom he has a crush.  (You could argue that the crush is arbitrary, considering that he celebrates by dancing out in a field alone.)  But the moment when the entire school rallies around this kid who memorized a dance routine is so much of a bridge too far.  I commented on Norman Rockwell because it's something that almost scream Americana, mostly pulling from an America that never existed.  

Again, there are lots of moments like this.  If you make a deal with yourself that King gets cornball, especially when he strays from horror, the scenes aren't so bad.  But it is hard to imagine that people's reactions to what are borderline silly moments are that earnest is kind of absurd.  I'd love to live in a world where The Life of Chuck got people to bring the best versions of themselves out.  Maybe I've grown too cynical.  And it's not like King is too hopeful for humanity.  I don't think he actually thinks people are that great, to be honest.  It's just that his reactions are just slightly off from what they should be.  As opposed to the "Way to go, Chuck!" comments coming from everyone, I think that we should have a healthy dose of politeness or pity claps.  I know that doesn't sell as hard as everyone rallying around the dancing tiny kid.  It's just that these moments kind of read as Simon Burch to me.

It's kind of insane to think the wealth of things that are covered in this movie.  And that's maybe where I'm back on board the movie again.  The first act is crazy.  As I was watching a lot of the movie, I thought that the beginning of the film's very big idea was unearned.  The film starts off with the world quickly ending.  People are trying to live normal lives as the world collapses around them.  It's a bit of a puzzle box trying to understand the supernatural things that affect these people.  And I'll go ahead and say that it is super interesting.  I read The Life of Chuck short story (as I already mentioned) and I still forgot how that played out.  Even with that knowledge, I kept thinking that maybe the opening didn't work for the film.

That would be true if he film didn't develop a motif of "I Contain Multitudes."  Sure, it's a little forced.  Sure, it's almost lobbing a cookie to the English teacher in me.  Heck, I might even criticize that it almost does a disservice to Whitman's poem (if it wasn't presented so darned lovingly).  But the movie almost writes a scenario where it can do wild and outlandish things in a story about a kid who loves to dance because stories don't have to be one thing.  The movie is presented in a reverse three-act structure and all of those acts give almost a different genre.  We get a hint of the apocalypse.  We get the story of an accountant who dances.  We get the story of a ghost in the attic.  That's a lot to take in because it's not like those connections are made explicit.  It's fun and I can see someone being really turned off.  But "I contain multitudes" does a lot of heavy lifting that explains it.

It's not a perfect movie.  I enjoyed it.  Honestly, even though I'm still sporting a pretty impressive headache, I enjoyed it.  But I can't deny that the movie is aggressively cornball.  There's so much cheese and saccarine in this movie that I'd hate to treat reality in the way that The Life of Chuck treats it.  It's more than a little indulgent.  If you go into it with that attitude and make peace with that, it's sweet.  But in terms of really nailing what it means to be human, there's a disconnect there.