There’s a scrap of homespun philosophy that resembles, at first glance, Christian anthropology. Life’s value doesn’t come from the big things but from the small. The most precious of things is the ordinary. Such are the implicit theses of a subgenre one might term “life-affirming cinema.” At one point in the new film The Life of Chuck, Nick Offerman’s faux-authoritative narrator, observing strangers caught up in an impromptu dance, says, “That is why God made the world. Just that.”
Although it’s not exclusive to the 1990s, I often associate the life-affirming subgenre with that era. Its mood is ubiquitous, from Dead Poets Society to The Shawshank Redemption to Forrest Gump. These films value simplicity, authenticity, and innocence over sophistication, structure, and society, a sort of transcendentalism for the modern age.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, it’s Shawshank and The Green Mile author Stephen King who wrote the short story upon which The Life of Chuck is based. It’s as pure a specimen of life-affirming cinema as is possible to find. Expanded here to full length by writer-director Mike Flanagan, the film’s premise is rich with opportunities for reflection on mortality, human value, and vocation.
But instead of turning to philosophers or theologians for answers, the film hangs itself on one line of Walt Whitman, his most famous: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” It’s too slender a strand upon which to suspend such heavy realities.
The story starts in a bourgeois apocalypse. A teacher, Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), reasons with parents over their children’s infractions, though it all seems rather pointless. After all, the world is ending. Every disaster has hit simultaneously—internet outages, earthquakes, famines. Somehow, a grim but functioning suburban life remains in the ennui of a dying world, and Marty and his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan) find each other before the stars blink out, one by one. We probably shouldn’t be surprised, Marty says, because, as Carl Sagan explained in the documentary Cosmos, we’re living in the last moments of the universe.
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Contrasted against this dystopia is one bright spot: a chipper ad resembling a retirement card for a smiling man. “Thank you, Chuck! Thirty-nine great years,” the ad exults. It’s a sort of grim, ironic meme, the origin of which is lost. No one remembers who Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) is anymore.
Not even Chuck, because as it turns out, all of this is the “universe” in his head. He’s in a coma, dying in the arms of his wife, at the age of 39. The next two acts of the film follow one life-affirming day, not in the middle of his life but nine months from its end, when he impulsively dances to the beat of a drummer. Then the film finally jumps back to childhood (where he’s portrayed by a winsome Jacob Tremblay as an adolescent, and Benjamin Pajak as a child). At a young age, he’s orphaned; his early life is shaped by his grandparents’ tastes, his school career as a dancer, and his final confrontation with a premonition of what Sagan knew: The end is inevitable.
Over the course of Chuck’s childhood, we discern the origin of both his imagined apocalypse and his dance in the second act. He associates dancing primarily with his grandmother (Mia Sara), who would swing her hips to rock music while cooking. Arithmetic, meanwhile, Chuck connects with his grandfather, Albie (Mark Hamill), who once softened a stern speech about the poor job market for dancers by waxing poetic about numbers. (Chuck will eventually become an accountant.) Albie’s speech is one of the story’s more graceful moments, avoiding tired clichés that may have made the old man an easy villain—the grim authority figure on the side of math, certainty, and death.
But Albie is associated with death all the same. The only moment in the film shot like Stephen King’s normal horror milieu is when Chuck decides to look into the locked cupola, the one room in the house banned from his entry.
If we really are living in the last gasp of the universe, how can we fully live under this shadow? Knowing death will come, what is the use of dancing? The math never lies.
The film’s pretensions to profundity come up short here, partly due to failures of craft. You can hear the typewriter behind each character. Everyone loves to soliloquize, even a charming neighbor who drops his chipper small talk to meander about how the end is near. It may make sense when everyone is in one person’s head, as in the beginning act, but the tic continues through the other stories. This is all topped off by a cloying and unnecessary voice-over. One wishes the script had mined a richer vein of transcendentalist rhetoric than one line of Whitman or plumbed a deeper well of cultural knowledge than Cosmos.
But does the film at least ask the right questions? Why do we celebrate celebrities, sports stars, and astronauts instead of the ordinary man? Why do we look for fame and glory when we should rather rejoice in the perfection of a flower or savor a well-prepared meal?
Ultimately, what doesn’t land about The Life of Chuck is that the life it affirms is so curated that it doesn’t ring true. In such stories, the “ordinary” is never actually ordinary. The ordinary man, supposedly an Everyman pacing through a universal life, in fact often shows extraordinary virtues and talents and an exceptionally childlike innocence. He rarely breaks from his secular sainthood to descend to the level of foibles and flaws.
At first, he may seem like a Christ figure, but he’s not. He’s the natural man, untouched by society. Instead of having a heart tempted by sin, the life-affirming hero has an inner light which external forces—society, death—seek to snuff. His purity is achieved by living an authentic, mindful life. He doesn’t need to be saved. He has pulled himself up by his spiritual bootstraps.
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Christians, rather than trusting in these self-oriented virtues, believe that purity leads to authenticity, not the other way around. And whence comes purity? From without and within at the same time, through the work of God. It may seem a fine distinction, but it explains why there’s always something a bit phony about the Everyman hero.
There’s a sentimentality in life-affirming stories that shortchanges the viewer. The problem with sentiment is not that it glamorizes bad things but that it makes good things into ultimate things (to paraphrase Tim Keller).
If life is really just a collection of experiences and memories, is the meaning of life then to be found in the multiplying of those things? A sort of tourism as telos? At a certain point, the “multitudes” in our heads, the other people remembered, are only valuable to the degree that we value them. If the self is all—Chuck’s “wonderful” self, living life fully—then when his world ends, the world ends. There’s a narcissism and a nihilism beneath this chipper exterior of a film mimicking transcendence without actually providing it.
Of course, that sounds more serious than it should—this is still a movie where a boy teaches his class to moon walk. And Chuck is indeed wonderful, but it would be nice for someone to remind him, as Gandalf does Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit, that he is “only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all.” And as Bilbo responds, “Thank goodness!”
Hannah Long is an Appalachian writer living in New York City. Her writing has appeared in Angelus News, The Dispatch, and Plough Magazine.
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