The Life of Chuck plus Short Takes on some various other cinematic topics
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, but better options are on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue below [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan) rated R 111 min.
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
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If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
WHAT HAPPENS: (The events of this film are presented in reverse chronological order with what occurs in Act Three better clarified after you’ve seen what happens in Act One.) Act Three: Thanks, Chuck With occasional narration (Nick Offerman) we follow the events of middle-school teacher Marty Anderson’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) awareness of how strange things are happening both locally and worldwide: Natural disasters are cropping up everywhere, people are disappearing (most of the kids in his class aren’t coming), the Internet’s down (yet there’s upbeat music on the radio), and everywhere there are billboards, TV ads, etc. with a photo of a middle-aged guy and text of: “Charles Kranz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!” as if it’s some sort of retirement tribute. Then we see nurse Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillian) who comes to work only to find all the patients gone but monitors in every room active as if attached to a person. Later that day when they’re both home, Felicia calls ex-husband Marty, worried the universe is coming to an end; he explains Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar as if the 14 billion years of the universe were plotted out over 365 days so that people first appear on Dec. 31, all of what we’ve known as human civilization would occur in the last 10 seconds of that day. Then the electricity and phone service go out so Marty decides to walk over to Felicia’s house, although on the way he meets, talks a bit with Funeral Director Sam Yarborough (Carl Lumbly), who, like Marty, has no idea who Charles Kranz is. It’s dark by the time Marty gets to Felicia so they sit outside, worried, then watch as stars begin to disappear from the sky with distant explosions; suddenly, the screen goes black and silent for a disturbingly long time. (Toward the end of Act Three we cut away briefly to a man—whom we understand is Chuck [Tom Hiddleston]—lying in a bed, unconscious, dying as wife Ginny [Q’orianka Kilcher] and teenage son Brian [Antonio Raul Corbo] are at his side, Ginny giving the final encouragement to let go, let his life come to the end.)
Act Two: Busker Forever We’re back to a good bit more narration now as we learn that this segment takes place 9 months before Chuck’s death, as he’s an accountant attending a conference. As the panels at Chuck's business session wrap up on a given day, he’s walking back to his hotel when he comes across a drummer busker (a street or mass-transit station musician hoping for tips in the hat), Taylor Franck (Taylor Gordon), a young woman who put aside her parents’ hopes of a professional concert career for her to just play what moves her out in public; Oddly, though, Chuck stops, puts down his briefcase, starts spontaneously dancing to Taylor’s rhythms, soon drawing a crowd of interested spectators; one of them is Janice Halliday (Annalise Basso), walking home in a distraught mood given she’d just received a text from her boyfriend breaking up with her. She joins Chuck in the dance in league with the drums, finishing to great applause and a lot of cash in the hat. Later, Taylor splits the profits with them, tries to convince them to make a career of this, only for Chuck and Janice to decline, then each goes their separate way that night (even as Chuck is distracted for a bit by a headache; we’ll later understand that he died miserably from brain cancer).
Act One; I Contain Multitudes Narration again explains Chuck’s situation, this time as a 7-year-old (Cody Flanagan) whose parents died in an auto accident so he’s living (in constant sadness) with his father’s parents, Albie (Mark Hamill) and Sarah (Mia Sara); by the time he’s 10 (Benjamin Pajak), though, some joy has returned to the home as Grandma dances to radio music while she cooks, encourages Chuck to join her, which he eagerly does; accountant Albie, however, drinks too much, seems to have visions, wants Chuck to put aside his dreams of being a professional dancer to find art in the mysteries of math. As 6th grade finishes at Chuck’s school (where we briefly see Marty as one of the faculty), Chuck’s teacher, Ms. Richards (Kata Siegel), reads some of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (1855 [see Section 51 in the link]), encourages him to ask her what the phrase “I contain multitudes” means; she explains that we all build up our own internal universes consisting of people we know, things we’ve experienced, material that we've encountered, fantasies we’ve created, etc. Chuck’s life takes a sudden bad turn, though, when Sophie suddenly dies in a supermarket, leading Albie to drink even more, fiercely forbid Chuck from entering the locked copula at the top of the house (we later learn Albie had visions there of people dying, possibly himself too).
At school, Chuck joins the extracurricular dance club run by Ms. Rohrbacher (Samantha Sloyan), where he excels, partnering successfully with older, taller Cat McCoy (Trinity Bliss) who wants him to join her at the school’s Fall Fling. Chuck attends the event but is too shy to dance until encouraged by Ms. Rohrbacher. Chuck and Cat put on a great show (all the rest watch, applaud), followed by him continuing to dance alone outside in the dark until he cuts his hand on a metal fence. ⇒When Chuck’s (Jacob Tremblay) into his late teens, Albie dies leaving him enough money for college and an envelope of personal items including the key to the cupola’s padlock. Chuck finally goes in, sees a man in a bed dying, realizes it’s him by the scar on the man’s hand. Despite now knowing something of his fate, Chuck dedicates himself to living life to the fullest (even though he becomes an accountant), now saying “I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.”⇐
SO WHAT? This marvelously-unique film is adapted from Steven King’s same-named novella in his 2020 compilation If It Bleeds, where it's presented in the same reverse-chronological fashion so what we read/see at the start requires a journey into Chuck’s past for the full understanding to become clear. If you don’t care about spoilers you can watch this short video (7:45) which goes into clear detail about what’s happening here, but in my spoiler-alert fashion I’ll just say ⇒what we see in Act Three is the end of Chuck’s inner-universe as his life ends, not the physical universe we all inhabit. In retrospect, we have clues in Act Three about all this such as when we see Marty in his home that has an upstairs door padlocked as with Chuck’s copula along with Marty talking to the Funeral Director who says he doesn’t know who Charles Krantz is despite having extensive interaction with Chuck just after Albie died, so we can later understand how Chuck’s mind was losing command of his memories (and assumptions/fantasies where Marty and Felicia are concerned, as we have no evidence he ever knew Marty’s wife when or after they were married, so we can deduce that what collapsed is the universe Ms. Richards told Chuck was in his ever-expanding awareness way back in grade school [we also realize that all of those media messages thanking Chuck for 39 years were extrapolations from Ginny’s final words to Hubby: “39 great years. Thanks, Chuck.”]).⇐
I was really moved by the human drama of this story (even the aspects of Act Three that I learned about later), so much so that I’m easily rating it as 4½ stars, an honor I’ve bestowed only 17 previous times since beginning this blog back in mid-December, 2011 (with 10 of them distant, given to films from 2020 or earlier, even as postings this year hit a high mark as this now makes 3 of my 2025 reviews to earn this honor—the other 2 are 2024 films, Conclave [Edward Berger] and Nickel Boys [RaMell Ross]—yet this is the only one of this group [along with most of anything else I’ve ever seen, aside from regular classroom presentations when I was teaching] that I’ve watched a second time, not for details I might have missed but just because I [and my wife, Nina, who continues to be pleased with my recent choices that don’t wallow in violence—OK, the universe comes to an end here but the only noticeable difficulties are brief TV images of flooding and other nature fury, a major sinkhole in Chuck’s town some cars have fallen into, and the termination of stars, but all of that’s presented in a quick, distanced fashion] liked it so much we wanted to see it again before our rental window ran out). It’s such a beautiful story of a man who encountered tragedy in his early life (parents and paternal grandparents died before he was 20); only lived to be 39; seemingly to honor his grandfather he devoted his professional life to accounting (hopefully he found the art the old man promised was essential in those numbers) rather than the dancing that truly stirred his soul; yet he faced up to every challenge going way back to grade school, found a sense of accomplishment in his life so as to be able to celebrate himself on his deathbed. In addition to the inspiration this story offers for all of us to find the joy even in the worst of situations (as Nina and I must do in encountering the sociopolitical horrors of the daily news) the reverse-revelations concept is marvelous to experience, learning more of Chuck as we enhance our understanding of what’s being presented to us, especially after wondering at first if our cosmic days are ultimately, truly numbered.
BOTTOM LINE FINAL COMMENTS: The Life of Chuck was made in 2024, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival that year so this far into 2025 I normally wouldn't reach back, although what matters to my imposed procedures is that it finally came to domestic (U,S.-Canada) theaters on June 6, 2025 (still in a very few of them, so far has made $6.7 million [$11.5 million worldwide]), now is readily available on streaming where it rents for $9.99 from Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+. Overall, the CCAL’s not as enthusiastic as I am, with the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 80%, the Metacritic average score at 67%, but there’s still plenty of praise for this film, as with Thomas Floyd of The Washington Post: “As the scientific conceit makes clear, our lives are but imperceptible blips on the vast timeline of the universe. Yet Whitman’s poem raises the idea that every psyche contains another sprawling world unto itself, populated with the people, memories and scars we collect while navigating our finite existence. What are we if not the remarkable sum of our experiences and our imaginations? […] this meditation on the bittersweet beauty of the human condition is sweeping in sentiment and surgical in intent. Flanagan wants his audience to reflect on the passing moments of connection that carry outsize significance and the simple joys that make life worth living. Not saccharine but soulful, ‘The Life of Chuck’ arrives at life-affirming profundity through a blend of surrealist wonder and humanist truth. It’s no wonder this marvel of a movie claimed the Toronto International Film Festival’s coveted audience prize last fall.”
For a negative reaction far away, though, I can turn to San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle who was indignantly-disgusted by this film: “ ‘The Life of Chuck” is so earnest and sincerely made that it will probably be mistaken for a good movie by most people. Viewers may assume they’re not enjoying it because there’s something wrong with them — when really the movie is a badly arranged, scattered and mostly dull assemblage of phony merchandise. […] It would be easier to care about Chuck’s concerns if something cataclysmic weren’t happening to everybody else. But that’s just how it is with all of us and the apocalypse. It feels personal. […] With all this in mind, there’s no way to recommend ‘The Life of Chuck.’ ” I’ve often included LaSalle, agree with him or not, but here we’re fully far apart, as if on different planets (no worries about them blowing up, though). So, I highly recommend The Life of Chuck and will simply leave you with my standard Musical Metaphor, this time The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” (Let It Be album, 1970) at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jfVOmE1yoRo&list=RDjfVOmE1yoRo&start_radio=1 with footage shot in rehearsals which would become the Let It Be documentary (Michael Lindsay-Hall, 1970), because whether we’re talking about Chuck or John Lennon (lived only until 40 until his own tragedy so I must admit something did change their worlds) the result is similar: “Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes / They call me on and on across the universe / Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box / They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe.”1
1If you’d like to know more about that “Jai Guru Deva, Om” chant, here's some info. I also used this song and commented about it in my review of Bound (Isaac Hirotsu Woofer) earlier this year.
SHORT TAKES
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
Some options for your consideration: (1) IMDb's Five Things to Watch on the week of 8/3/2025 (well, maybe, but they're not enticing me much); (2) IMDb's Staff Picks for August 2025.
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