everybody Wang Chun tonight
dir: Mike Flanagan
2025
The Life of Chuck is a flick that seems to have not found much of an audience, despite being the creation, at least in its written form, of America’s most prolific, best and possibly most handsome writer, being Stephen King. He is a one man industry, or at least, his ideas are so great that all of them have to be adapted into something.
Unlike most of his stuff, this isn’t horror – this is something… else. Maybe it’s existential in nature, maybe it’s a gentle “live life to its fullest because we never know when it’s going to end” type of story, maybe it is a story about how life is like a box of chocolates, so you might as well dance before the world ends.
Who knows (Stephen King probably knows)? What I did see in reviews of the flick, from those reviewers that I follow, or respect, or both, is that those who loved it really thought it was one of the films of the year. I’m going to lazily say that half the people who saw it thought it was great and half thought it was absolute hollow dogshit, because I’m not sure I want to take the time to calculate the real statistic.
Reviews were very much like that. I only mention it (I mean, who cares what reviewers say about anything, huh?) because it really was one of those cases where those who loved it really did, and those who didn’t thought it wasn’t mediocre, they thought it was fucking terrible. That level of hostility, I’m not going to read too much psychology into it, but to me that kind of extreme comes from people feeling actively betrayed by what they watched.
I don’t really get it. I neither think it’s a great film, nor do I think it’s terrible. I didn’t find its central conceit too insulting, nor did I find its seeming message to be anything that extraordinary. I find it perplexing that Tom Hiddleston is in this, because he really doesn’t have that much to do, and he doesn’t even play the Chuck character for the majority of the flick.
My main agreement with anyone else that might complain is that it is a very strange story told arse-backwards for a very good reason, that reason being it’s about the life of Chuck rather than his death. We know he’s going to die, because everyone does, but if there’s anything this flick is trying to impress upon us, is that you should really take up every opportunity to dance with someone while you can.
What he achieves in life we’re not going to find out about. That’s outside the scope of this story. How he met his wife and started a family: Not relevant.
What is relevant: His death, after 39 good years, we keep being told; the time nine months before when he heard a drumming busker, bumped into a young redhead, and they danced exuberantly before an enthusiastic crowd; and the entirety of Chuck’s sad childhood leading up to the night of a big dance, where he couldn’t bring himself to dance.
So, a film, told in three parts, and he’s not really in the first section, which is the last and third part of the story, and the first part of his life is told in the last part of the film.
Chronologically complex! Not really; it’s pretty straight forwards, except that it’s backwards. The hardest part involved in talking about this flick is conveying to people why they should care. We never really get much of an indication as to why Chuck matters that much in the scheme of things, even in the course of his own life, to the people around him.
There are precedents to this kind of storytelling, and I hesitate to mention them, because I feel like it creates a false comparison, a set of bollocks associations. The most obvious kind of flick to mention would be the one I alluded to earlier, being Forrest Gump, but it’s really nothing like that strange boomer comfort movie. Also, mentioning Ben Stiller’s take on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty would only confuse people who, if they watched both of these flicks in close proximity, might draw analogies and connections between them, but wouldn’t necessarily see how it connects to Life of Chuck.
The connection I’m drawing is not that they’re all flicks about fictional people whose names are in the titles of their movies.
Walter Mitty simultaneously pushes the idea that a small person who most of humanity would think was pretty insignificant still has some value to himself and the people around him, but also that he needed to take some risks in order to be the person he always dreamed he could be.
Gump is whatever the fuck it is, including that it’s the story of a fictional simpleton who was secretly the reason why so many things went wrong in the latter half of the 20th Century, but it’s also a wide-spanning view of a life in which so much happens yet the inherently decent person at its core is never changed by the constant changes around him.
Chuck is kind of a story about an inherently decent person who starts off afraid of life because of the immense grief within which he grows up after losing his parents at an appallingly young age, who is given many reasons not to follow his dreams, which he doesn’t, and then, because life is fundamentally unfair, dies a horrible death when a terrible glioblastoma destroys much of his mind before killing him.
And yet… and yet…
It’s not really about any of that, nor that at least he found one person who loved him and helped bring up one child that also hopefully loved him before he died, who would remember him fondly throughout their lives. It’s mostly (maybe) about how we, as people, maybe don’t entirely exist on our own, as individual beings. Sure, we have names, and society forces us to have particular numbers on paper to identify us and such, and at least in the beginning we’re 49 per cent of one person’s DNA and 51 per cent of our mother’s, but that’s not a distinct, discrete being yet, undifferentiated and unformatted.
We eventually, if we’re lucky enough, become all the people we’ve known and met; the central ‘us’ arises out of this agglomeration, we all in a sense contain the multitudes that Walt Whitman alluded to in his poem Song of Myself.
The most scathing reviews I’ve read of this flick state outright that they’re convinced the director and screenwriter have completely misunderstood the poem, either in its entirety or that line specifically, and to that I say, who fucking died and made you the boss of Walt Whitman?
Explanations of what it all means and everything Whitman was trying to encompass, to hug with arms wide enough to include all of humanity, are as abundant and multifarious as there are people who will ever read the poem in its entirety, either voluntarily or at the gun point of school. The multitudes contain multitudes, don’t you know?
But this kid, this character, heard his teacher reading this poem, and it made a strong impression on him, and did throughout his life. He housed many aspects, and many contradictions, and many fears and sadnesses, and everyone who touched his life made him greater as a person, and connected him to the vastness that is the world of people.
The moments that mattered in his life, the ‘important’ dances, they all connect to something powerful, even if they themselves are just what they are, minor events in the lives of minor people.
But there are no minor people to people themselves, or those that love (or hate) them, just in comparison to what other, perhaps unkind people, judge to be important. The power they wielded, the harm they caused, maybe that’s what makes those other people major.
Not Chuck, though. What made him major, or special, is that he lived, he danced a few times, he lived his life despite finding out, as we find out at film’s end, that he knew what he knew about his life to come, and lived it anyway, and that there is a gentle beauty to that.
Again, it’s a confusing way to try to explicate this film, but these are really the only clumsy tools of words at my disposal with which to try to grasp the ungraspable. I enjoyed this flick immensely. I don’t think it’s a great flick, though it looks great and there are plenty of great performances in it (mostly what I would call great ‘one shots’, where fairly famous actors have one scene, nail it, and then fuck off never to be seen again). The mawkish soundtrack tries to goose the audience when many of the scenes don’t warrant it into feeling something that comes across as manipulative.
I don’t agree that there is a central hollowness to the story (when I described it to my partner, she said it sounded like I was describing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was certainly a hollow, long-arsed movie), because there’s more there than many people are giving it credit for. It’s a flick that requires patience, but the patience isn’t going to be rewarded with a cathartic climax or a conventionally enjoyable structure: the flick ends on the image of an empty room, sunlight coming in through the window, a room Chuck was told to stay away from all his young life by his fiercely protective grandfather (Mark Hamill).
That room is either empty, or it contains multitudes (maybe ghosts, but multitudes all the same). Either the flick is empty, or it contained for me a bunch of things to think about and feel.
Beyond beauty and meaning being in the eye of the beholder, that’s all that I can ask for.
8 times I not only contain multitudes I’ve eaten multitudes out of 10
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“I will live my life until my life runs out” - The Life of Chuck
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