Apocalypse No: “The Life of Chuck” Stumbles at the Finish Line

It’s impossible to discuss “The Life of Chuck” without revealing the ending, because that’s where the movie starts. It’s built backward, as is the Stephen King novella on which it’s based. A title card declares the beginning of the film to be its Act Three, subtitled “Thanks Chuck,” an apocalyptic story centered on a schoolteacher, Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor). A class he’s teaching on the penultimate section of Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself”—the section with the famous line “(I am large, I contain multitudes)”—is interrupted by news of a catastrophic earthquake that has dumped a big chunk of California into the ocean. Soon thereafter, parents who are conferring with him start panicking about an internet outage that seems to be worldwide. News accounts of fires, floods, erupting volcanoes, plagues, the loss of arable land, and mass extinctions evoke a planet in collapse. There’s a massacre of students near the White House, a revolution in Russia, war between India and Pakistan. Restlessness and social dislocation are everywhere, including in Marty’s town: hordes of people are quitting their jobs or leaving home to wander off in search of long-lost lovers.

Amid the chaos, Marty notices something strange: a huge billboard depicting a bespectacled man in business attire (Tom Hiddleston) writing in a ledger alongside the text “Charles Krantz 39 great years! Thanks Chuck!” Versions of the same tribute start to crop up in unlikely places—on the radio, on television stations that are otherwise out of commission, as graffiti, as skywriting, and even in the windows of houses without electricity. Everyone is bewildered—who is Chuck? An undertaker (Carl Lumbly) whom Marty meets refers to Chuck as “the Oz of the Apocalypse.” Marty reconnects with his ex-wife, Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillan), a nurse at a local hospital where most of the staff is leaving and the patients have to be relocated. Even though all the beds are empty, the heart monitors beside them are still beeping, in unison, at seventy-five beats per minute.

Before Act Three ends, the trick is partly given away: Chuck is at home, in bed and obviously dying, attended tearfully by his wife, Ginny (Q’orianka Kilcher), and their son, Brian (Antonio Raul Corbo). His heart monitor beeps at seventy-five beats per minute. The synching, so early in the story, of Chuck’s decline to the world’s destruction almost completely undermines the ensuing Acts Two and One, leaving them little more to do than a working-out of the plot. The writer and director, Mike Flanagan, nonetheless occasionally shakes that synching feeling and rescues a few scenes from the constraints of the movie’s jigsaw-puzzle construction. He has a keen directorial eye for the small but salient details which, by cropping up early on and being echoed later, are key to the plot’s construction. But almost nothing feels discovered. The details are planted like Easter eggs, and the moments of realization that result seem akin to fan service, paying off in recognition rather than in substance. A few scenes offer a welcome, acute observational curiosity, as when cellphone service cuts out and Marty and his neighbors leave their houses and point their phones skyward in the hope of bars. But a voice-over (spoken by Nick Offerman) authoritatively and impersonally dispenses information, whether backstory or foreshadowing or characters’ states of mind, serving merely to fill gaps in the story like narrative grout.

Still, there’s one key element to the movie that catches Flanagan’s eye and gives it heart. Act Two, “Buskers Forever,” finds Chuck, who works as an accountant, attending a banking conference in an unnamed city. A drummer named Taylor (Taylor Gordon) is busking on the street and, as the nerdy-looking Chuck passes by, she acknowledges him. He responds with a little juke, and then he starts to dance, exuberantly but with knowing and practiced control. A crowd forms, including a young woman named Janice (Annalise Basso), who gives a little juke too. Chuck coaxes her to join him and they cut loose, responding with energy and aplomb every time Taylor switches up her beats, thrilling their spontaneous audience.

To watch dancing is intrinsically delightful, and Flanagan, without doing anything exceptional with the camera, conveys a spectatorial sense of that delight. For a few brief moments, he seems to be looking at the action along with viewers rather than merely showing it. Even here, though, the narrative freedom the dance conveys is doubly undercut: the voice-over has declared that Chuck is unaware he has just nine more months to live, and several flash frames during his impromptu performance show a middle-aged woman dancing in the kitchen while cooking, thus reducing the dance to a simplifying backstory. That backstory is unfolded in the final segment, “Act One: I Contain Multitudes,” the story of young Chuck (played, in various stages of childhood and adolescence, by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak, and Jacob Tremblay) and how he ended up as an accountant with an irrepressible urge to dance.

Here, too, Chuck’s just-so story fits together with a suffocating tightness—and, here, too, dance once again comes to the rescue. This is a good place to draw the line at spoilers. Suffice it to say that, as indicated by the flash frames, Chuck’s grandmother, Sarah (Mia Sara), teaches him to dance; he joins his school’s dance club and (as incarnated by Pajak) becomes a star dancer; but, for a variety of spoiler-y reasons (including a supernatural one that gets much screen time but little consideration), practicality wins out and he becomes an accountant. Along the way, some good bits of dialogue are dispensed, as when Chuck’s dance teacher (Samantha Sloyan) imparts a lesson in candor, and when his grandfather (Mark Hamill) extols the virtues of math. But clues recur with a deflating obviousness from Act to Act: a roller-skating girl with pigtails (Violet McGraw) turns up in Marty’s world and in Chuck’s; so does the undertaker; so does a padlocked door at the top of a staircase; so does the song “Gimme Some Lovin’ ”; and so, even, does Marty himself.

As for the apocalypse, mum’s the word, except for one thing: it’s foretold at the end of the movie’s Act Three segment and is so brazenly fabricated as to feel like self-parody. Unlike horrors and dreams and fantasies, the imaginary world that dominates “The Life of Chuck” is utterly devoid of personality. The trickery of its creation is clever but impersonal for reasons that go beyond the story’s stiff detail-twiddling: the effort to convert the powerful pathos of Chuck’s terminal illness into a coherent and consistent narrative arc ends up filtering out his perspective, the extremes of his subjectivity. The result is a clean, suburban apocalypse, trouble in someone else’s back yard. One voice-over sentence near the end of Act Two about Chuck’s final agonies suggests the depths of that experience, but it’s a depth that Flanagan can’t get near. The problem goes deeper than the matter of one filmmaker’s artistic imagination, though; it’s a problem of cinematic form itself. The conventions of genre inevitably hit the wall of complexity and usually bounce far away. The great filmmakers allow those conventions to shatter and then form something new from the fragments. Flanagan, however, builds the conventional story so densely and launches it with such conviction that its complexities give way. “The Life of Chuck” confronts the mysteries of life and the universe and leaves no wonder at all. ♦