THE LIFE OF CHUCK
Running time: 110 minutes. Not yet rated.
“Life is very long,” wrote T. S. Eliot.
So is “The Life of Chuck,” horror maestro Mike Flanagan’s sap-fest that premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Based on Stephen King’s not-at-all-scary short story, the one-note tale unfolds backward in three soupy parts, and is narrated by Nick Offerman like a lumberjack Dr. Seuss.
The first, featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor as a schoolteacher named Marty who is contending with the oncoming apocalypse, is so conspicuously bad you figure there must be a method to its messiness.
And there is, but the twist that explains away this confounding world only ups the film’s quality from awful to fine.
At the start, there is a religion-meets-sci-fi vibe not unlike “The Leftovers,” only lesser, and a natural-disaster doom à la “The Day After Tomorrow.”
The East and West Coasts have been subsumed by the oceans, the Midwest is on fire and the internet is down. Still, people mindlessly commute to work and school, circumnavigating sinkholes, because they don’t know what else to do.
Flanagan mines some gallows humor out of the crumbling planet. At a parent-teacher conference with Marty, a shattered man mourns the loss of PornHub.
Ejiofor is, rightly, in a state of emotional paralysis as Marty — guzzling hard liquor at home and spouting off philosophical, mathematical mumbo jumbo on the phone to his ex-wife. Knowing the end is nigh, he goes off in search of her.
But everywhere Marty wanders he finds mysterious billboards, radio spots and TV commercials saying, “Charles Krantz, 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!”
Who buys ads at the end of the world?
So, the main question of the darkly comic Part One — other than “What time is it?” — is “Who is Chuck?”
The second, music-driven chapter peels away at that unknown. That’s when we finally meet Chuck (an unmemorable Tom Hiddleston), a ho-hum businessman traveling on a work trip to a bland town that looks like a Hollywood lot.
Flanagan’s film continuously asks whether human beings are the product of fate or probability.
This sophomore section makes the case for spirituality as Chuck fortuitously encounters two women — a street drummer (Taylor Gordon) and a recently single retail worker named Janice (Annalise Basso), who was just broken up with by text.
Sensing an energy in the air, the drummer gets a beat going while Chuck and Janice break into a spontaneous asphalt dance like they’re Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
The duo’s routine is remarkably professional — this too is later explained — and is initially joyful but doesn’t know when to call it quits. Admittedly, the TIFF audience ate up the sight of a hoofing Hiddleston.
Then, the final, deepest third is about 7-year-old Chuck (Benjamin Pajak), who moves in with his grandparents after the death of his mom and dad.
Grandma Sarah (Mia Sara) loves to dance (get it?) and Albie (Mark Hamill) is a math geek accountant who teaches Chuck practicality via statistics and forbids him from ever going up to the spooky padlocked attic. Being a King story, there is a soupçon of supernatural.
Pajak, who played Winthrop in “The Music Man” on Broadway with Hugh Jackman, lights up the screen with his genuineness. His coming-of-age story, including Flanagan regular Samantha Sloyan as a saintly dance teacher, is cliched but cute.
And taking on the role of Chuck a few years later is Jacob Tremblay, who’s no longer the sweet little boy from “Room.”
The movie’s culmination, in which gradually we witness the elements big and small that added up to adult Chuck, thinks it’s more satisfying and poignant than it is.
Perhaps I was so underwhelmed because Flanagan, in excellent series such as “The Haunting of Hill House” and “Midnight Mass,” has proven himself a master puzzle maker.
In “The Life of Chuck,” the pieces come together much too obviously. And the takeaways — that a person is the product of experience, and don’t judge a book by its cover — are well-tread to the point of total flatness.
Nevertheless, the film won the all-important TIFF People’s Choice Award on Sunday. That prize, not picked by pretentious critics or industry juries, has been a solid predictor of Oscars fortunes over the years.
The last 12 have gone on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture and three in that span have won the top honor: “Nomadland,” “Green Book” and “12 Years A Slave.”
It is next to impossible to imagine a similar life for “The Life of Chuck.”
