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ZERO STARS/**** starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tom Hiddleston, Annalise Basso, Mark Hamill written by Mike Flanagan, based on the short story by Stephen King directed by Mike Flanagan
by Walter Chaw I admit it: I have an allergy to sentimental treacle. I get that this shit is like mother’s milk to some–that fading stars and, indeed, entire cable channels have tied their strings to the “shameless tearjerker” to great if niche fame and fortune; it’s a “me” problem, and I accept that. I reject being force-fed platitudes as meaningful life lessons. I break out in hives in the presence of humpy-bo-dumpty scores thick on strings and a sense of wonder, maybe a wistful tinkle of the keys when an angel earns its wings or dies of cancer. I dislike it enough that not even Macaulay Culkin getting stung to death by bees could save My Girl for me. I confess I haven’t read the Stephen King short story upon which Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck is based, though I do remember a lovely piece King published decades ago in his collection Night Shift, “The Last Rung on the Ladder,” that, sans any supernatural elements, managed to bring a tear to my eye. So it’s not King’s variety of sentiment I’m immune to (I weep my eyes out still at the last “I love you, man” in Christine), only the bad faith kind that traffics in broad stereotypes dedicated to milking those fucking tear ducts like Amish grandfathers speed-bagging the herd’s teats before dawn.
I’ll also admit that a large part of my aversion to feel-good slop likely has to do with my ingrained masculine toxicity–with it being hard enough to express vulnerable emotion without having it torn out of me in fistfuls by giant ham hands. You gotta buy me a drink first. In the case of film/television/theatre, be elegant, please–have some care for craft and story, so that even if the moral is “gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” you got me there with some respect for me as more than a collection of swollen glands. Which brings me to The Life of Chuck, a narrative told in three chunks, last chunk first (in the fashion of things trying very hard), in which we witness the end of the kingdom of Chuck’s mind, where all the places he treasured in his life are still standing instead of the office park that replaced it years ago. The condo development has somehow reverted to the neighbourhood video store and bodega. The older I get, the older the kingdom of my memory grows, too. Day by day, people I love die, and places I can’t imagine going out of business or getting paved over are gone, just like that.
It’s a nice idea, resurrecting the past like this, and it’s visualized from the point of view of Chuck’s memories, who, like us, fear that the world is ending because it is. (Ours is, anyway.) Yes, The Life of Chuck is ultimately just the premise of that old “Twilight Zone” episode where a bunch of shallowly drawn archetypes turn out to be dolls in a Salvation Army box. Chuck’s memories are sentient, you see, and Chuck dying is for them the end of the world, allowing a few hollow, thinly-sketched characters (chief among them an affable neighbour played by Matthew Lillard, typecast as hollow and thinly-sketched) to play-within-a-play our fear that our time is up as a passion play. Which, it occurs to me, is like another “Twilight Zone” episode where the Earth is falling into the sun and then you find out we’re actually drifting away from it. Remember when twists were gut-punches, not twee gimmicks to provoke an unearned emotional reaction?
Then the film jumps to the middle section, which has middle-aged Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) pausing on the way to work one day to dance to a busker so artfully as to stop traffic and cause quite a stir. After that, we come to the first third of this sad bildungsroman, where little Chuck (Benjamin Pajak), who really likes to dance, dances. Holding it all together is…not the audience. No, holding it all together is Nick Offerman, in a sneak peek at his retirement plan as Morgan Freeman Lifetime Narrator offering folksy voiceover about how important it is to live the one life you have and to dance like no one’s watching. The problem is that Chuck, despite receiving a premonition of his own death when he was a young man (inspiring him to regurgitate the only piece of Walt Whitman he memorized from elementary school), seems to have mainly been inspired to get a job in a cubicle requiring of a suit and a briefcase.
On his deathbed, it appears, what Chuck remembers most vividly is when he asked his terrible English teacher what Whitman meant by “containing multitudes,” those times he danced in public and at an elementary school dance, and each of his parents’ and grandparents’ deaths. I don’t know that I’ll have anything better flashed before my eyes when I shuffle off this mortal coil, but I’m not offering my life up as an inspirational middlebrow cause célèbre that probably would have won the Best Picture Oscar had it come out in November rather than June, thus saving it from being remembered with the same combination of dismay and embarrassment as Paul Haggis’s Crash. Embarrassment, as it happens, is the key emotion elicited by The Life of Chuck if you’re the sort of emotionally closed-off, relatively demanding asshole I am. Embarrassment of the second-hand variety, like when you go to a poetry open-mic and, dude, look, I’m sorry all that happened to you, but you’re not a poet. Anyway, you have one life to live, so live it. You don’t need me to tell you that. You sure as fuck don’t need The Life of Chuck to, either.
