“The Life of Chuck” forces twee positivity in a time when we need it the least

It’s nearly impossible to remain stoic and jaded in the face of someone who is dancing like no one’s watching. And in his new film, “The Life of Chuck,” writer-director Mike Flanagan is betting that even the most weary viewer will be charmed by the sight of Tom Hiddleston busting a move in the middle of the street. The film comes courtesy of the softer side of Stephen King, adapted from a story in his 2020 collection of novellas, “If It Bleeds.” And while Flanagan is no stranger to adapting King’s works — having tackled “Gerald’s Game” and “Doctor Sleep” (to varying results) — “The Life of Chuck” is not a thriller or a horror, but rather a slice of feel-good optimism. But that doesn’t mean the film is devoid of scares, oh no. In fact, “The Life of Chuck” makes the most terrifying assertion of the summer so far: Twee is headed for a revival. 

Watching the expertly choreographed, extended dance scene in the film’s middle act, it’s difficult to stop the brain from wandering back in time to the 2000s, when this kind of sequence was common in twee staples like “(500) Days of Summer” and “Napoleon Dynamite.” But in case you experienced a head injury by sticking your head out of a moving vehicle after reading Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” Flanagan’s film is here to bring the twee movement back for a new, precarious age. After Chbosky’s 1999 book sold millions of copies and inked countless infinity sign tattoos, twee art hit the market hard, marked by characters who were both precious and precocious, determined to be their own person no matter who disagreed; think “Juno,” “Where the Wild Things Are” and almost everything Miranda July, Wes Anderson and Zooey Deschanel did between the years 2001 and 2012. The message of these films was often that, no matter how difficult things get, everything will be alright in the end if you persevere. 

Annalise Basso as Janice Halliday and Tom Hiddleston as Charles “Chuck” Krantz in “The Life of Chuck” (Courtesy of Neon)

“The Life of Chuck” feels like a holdover from this era of feel-good fare, reworked and retrofitted to align with our contemporary anxieties. With three distinct acts told in reverse chronological order, even the film’s structure (which is faithful to King’s book) seems like it’s aiming for the kind of quirkiness that twee art typically boasted. But turn-of-the-millennium twee passed off its intrepid hopefulness with fully fleshed characters whose ambitions for stability looked just like ours. In Flanagan’s film, the titular Chuck (Hiddleston) is less aspiring, content with a humdrum accounting job and a fairly basic existence. If twee as it was made the future feel bright, twee as it is in “The Life of Chuck” makes the future feel bearable, if that. While that’s the most some of us can ask for right now, the film weaponizes our cultural anxiety and declares that living a tolerable life in a burning world is enough, so long as we make the most of it. Flanagan preys on the audience’s nostalgia and our desperate search for something heartwarming, wherever we can find it. And though it may provide some brief comfort for those powerless to its twee-lite charms, “The Life of Chuck” is just a loosely applied bandage, a “YOLO” bumper sticker that falls off the car the second the terrain gets a little too rough.

In the first act of Flanagan’s movie — that’s Act 3 for those who need to be reminded that “Life of Chuck” is not your average narrative feature, okay! — the world is ending. A massive earthquake has hit California, sending 90% of the state into the ocean. The internet is down forever, crops are dying, bees are extinct, the weather is erratic and famine is beginning to plague the world. For local elementary school teacher Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and most of those around him, global strife is the new norm. If a sinkhole opens up and swallows 10 cars, leaving traffic backed up for miles, people will just abandon their vehicles and walk five miles home. The only thing that seems to brighten people’s days, or at least distract them from the ceaseless suckfest that is their new life, are billboards depicting a smiling accountant named Chuck Krantz, thanking him for “39 great years” at the bank where he works. 

Marty’s world is a heightened version of the discord we’re experiencing these days, but the calamities and the characters’ detachment from them don’t feel far from our reality. One morning, Marty’s neighbor, Gus (Matthew Lillard), stops to warn Marty of an impossible traffic jam that will get him to work by noon at the earliest. Their brief hello turns into a moment to recall everything that has gone wrong, and just how quickly it all went to sh*t. When Gus mentions protests that swiftly quelled as people realized there was no solution, the mind immediately jumps to Los Angeles, and the protestors objecting to ICE’s presence in their communities, as well as to all the people going about their days, acting like nothing is wrong. 

Carl Lumbly as Sam Yarbrough and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Marty Anderson in “The Life of Chuck” (Courtesy of Neon)

While Flanagan understands humanity’s penchant for complacency in the face of chaos, his script does little to elucidate the reasons people turn a blind eye to their fellow humans’ suffering, much less pose any solutions. And as this act goes on, he opts for a trite missive about being with the one you love at the end of the world. Flanagan might portray Marty as the last remaining pillar of his community, but Marty’s characterization is too thin to grasp onto, and Flanagan spends far more time depicting a world crumbling at our feet. The imbalance preys on the audience’s existing anxieties, buried just below the surface, in a cheap move that makes the film’s picture of human misery more affecting than Marty’s good nature, just to drive home this act’s mawkish finale.

To be fair, there is a reason for Marty’s thinly sketched personality. Everything in Act 3 is not entirely as it seems, but to spoil that would be to take the whole movie with it, and maybe “The Life of Chuck” will be exactly what you need at this very moment. The film’s marketing, which insists this is from “the hearts and souls of Mike Flanagan and Stephen King,” would certainly like you to think so. Tom Hiddleston even wrote an essay about the film’s demonstration of “the courage and connection we need when the world is falling apart.” (Though, for the life of me, I can’t find this essay published anywhere, though Hiddleston has delivered the canned line on red carpets, too.) 

Start your day with essential news from Salon. Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

As someone who raised himself on the kind of twee films that “The Life of Chuck” is ostensibly mimicking, I desperately wanted to come away with some kind of attachment to it, some scene that would move me enough to believe the hype. But the closest I ever came to chills was during the dance sequence in Act 2, when we meet the real chuck for the first time, and something calls him to move to the beat of a busker’s drums in the middle of the street. The scene is earnest and exciting, the closest the movie comes to conveying its you-only-live-once message, which segues into Act 1, where we follow a young Chuck (Benjamin Pajak) as he experiences great loss and finds comfort in the release of dance.

Compared to its first act, this final portion of the film makes the concept of happiness seem vintage. Despite some seismic deaths in the family, Chuck’s life as a child in the ’80s is irrefutably better than the one we see him experiencing in Act 2, and certainly more so than the one Marty is enduring in Act 3. Flanagan traces Chuck’s life backward in time, letting us watch as the joy slips away, favored for an existence that prioritizes things that are practical and safe. In this last act, the film returns over and over again, ad nauseam, to a quote from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” — “I am large, I contain multitudes” — to hammer down the small ways Chuck’s curiosity is stamped out in his childhood. For a few brief years in his life, after hearing this passage of Whitman’s poem in class, Chuck allowed himself to feel wonderful, until a horrifying discovery set him on a different path. And by the end of his film, Flanagan hopes that, by having watched Chuck lose his sense of self, the viewer will rediscover theirs. 

Mark Hamill as Albie Krantz in ‘The Life of Chuck” (Courtesy of Neon)

But that’s a big ask, and the film’s rickety foundation of soothing bromides is hardly enough to build upon. How are we supposed to get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’ — as another one of King’s characters famously said — with so much stacked against us? Do we cut a rug out in public? Read Walt Whitman? Go be close to the people we love and wait for the nuclear winter? Flanagan is too concerned with the bones of his story to give us any of the meat, and once you poke at it, the skeleton falls apart. His version of twee has been hollowed out and boiled down to empty platitudes, bereft of any legitimately inspiring or actionable takeaways for the viewer. “The Life of Chuck” doesn’t confront the audience with the bleak realities of modern life to change their minds and open their hearts; it uses our dread against us. The film’s unconventional narrative construction and big, undeniable centerpiece dance sequence are little more than smoke and mirrors, distracting us from realizing that Flanagan’s script doesn’t have anything new or practical to say. 

With all of that flash and panache, the viewer might be lulled enough to recall a time not too long ago, when the sensible self-prioritization of twee was fading, and the recklessness of “YOLO” was creeping into its place. Had Flanagan taken King’s you-only-live-once theme and presented reasonable, modern ways to put it into practice, “The Life of Chuck” might not feel like such a void of meaning. Life’s impermanence should drive us, yes. But spending all of our time concerned with living our own lives to the fullest keeps us from seeing all the beauty, kinship and aid that those around us have to offer, and all we can offer them in return. Unlike the golden age of twee, dancing in the street and running into the arms of the one person you love aren’t enough for a happy ending. The world looks a hell of a lot different now. We are not infinite, as Chbosky said in “Perks of Being a Wallflower,” and a blunt bang won’t save you any more than it will Zooey Deschanel. Flanagan’s pastiche of palatable comfort might be well-meaning and familiar. But in modern practice, “The Life of Chuck” is no more than a nostalgia tranquilizer, designed to comfort you after you roll your ankle on a two-step, dancing like no one’s watching.