The Life of Chuck’s entire marketing effort, from poster taglines to Neon’s social media captions, centers around Walt Whitman’s famous “Song of Myself” and how an all-powerful, first-person self is “large” and “contains multitudes.” This stems from the poem’s placement throughout the movie: it opens and closes with Whitman’s words. The beauty of The Life of Chuck lies not in grandeur, but in the intimate self of Charles “Chuck” Krantz, whose all-encompassing life comes to an end after “39 great years.”
This is a movie in which dialogue and soliloquy take center stage—a hallmark of Flanagan’s films. While I don’t think this approach of contemplative movies focused on conversation will be for everyone, audiences expecting this pacing will surely appreciate the thoughtful and emotionally resonant (if occasionally sentimental) dialogue between Chuck and those around him.
Anchoring it all is Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), whose gentle, unshowy charisma reframes that omnipresent face plastered across billboards, NPR ads, and TV interruptions as Mars collapses and the universe sputters out. This raises him as a question: who is this figure seemingly steering the apocalypse? The reverse-chronological acts answer with the most ordinary man imaginable: an accountant in a suit, briefcase in hand, who slips out of a banking conference to dance to a busking drummer (Taylor Franck) as if to keep the cosmos on beat. Flanagan braids Chuck’s “multitudes” across ages through Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay, whose younger iterations carry the same wonder and ache you see in Hiddleston’s eyes. Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Felicia (Karen Gillan), estranged yet tender, lend the opening movement its human pulse while the world seems to fray. Mark Hamill, as grandfather Albie, turns a porch-side riff on math into a benediction, with Mia Sara’s grandmother offering the kitchen-dance grace that lingers over the ending we already witnessed. All in all, it’s an ensemble calibrated for conversation, each performance a small universe worth exploring again and again.
By telling the story backwards—starting with Chuck’s cosmic impact right before the “end,” then progressing in reverse—it embodies the “I contain multitudes” premise. There’s a powerful scene in which middle-school Chuck questions the phrase. The teacher (Kate Siegel), placing her hands on Chuck’s temples, explains that the head stores not only the brain but also memories he gains over the course of his life, forming a universe within his mind. This was a revelatory moment, and a highlight of the movie, which explains the apocalyptic opening and emphasizes just how important it was to begin and conclude the movie with a reading of Whitman’s renowned quote.
I never see Flanagan as a “cinematic” director whose formal techniques should be scrutinized. Granted, this movie was handsomely shot by cinematographer Eben Bolter and concisely edited by Flanagan himself. But his strength lies in writing dialogue and directing his characters’ deliveries. Every word that comes from these people carries weight, and I don’t sense that any dialogue feels wasted. In the end, The Life of Chuck feels like a collection of fragments inspired by My Dinner with Andre but delivered in the manner of Forrest Gump. It feels like an old-school crowd-pleaser from the late 20th century, when optimism and sentimentality defined the zeitgeist. We don’t often see this overtly emotional display (complete with voice-over narration) in theaters now.
At times, it can feel overtly saccharine. Any attempt to write about this movie will likely result in a predictable life lesson, because its structure and narration tell the audience exactly how to feel. Some will see this as a filmmaking flaw, but those who accept it for what it is will consider it to be a feature. This is simply how Flanagan’s films operate. Flanagan is a romantic at heart who has told heartfelt horror stories about cursed mirrors, haunted houses, and modern-day vampires. Often heralded as one of today’s great horror filmmakers, he’s directed a sequel to a Stephen King/Stanley Kubrick classic and seemingly gained carte blanche to create a show based on Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. I often consider The Haunting of Hill House to be the pinnacle of Flanagan’s work—his horror storytelling was always just a vehicle for him to explore complex themes of family, love, and grief that are laid bare without genre trappings. Even in Midnight Mass, a story of a modern-day vampire infiltrating a small town, he beautifully deals with themes of grief and hatred in compelling ways, complete with unforgettable soliloquies as well. With The Life of Chuck, Flanagan uses the sci-fi genre to explore the all-encompassing life of a regular man. While it doesn’t rank among his best works, it remains a respected effort.
In the end, The Life of Chuck tells a sentimental (but often overdone) story of finding the extraordinary within the ordinary. It sometimes fails to reach the profound and magical heights needed to elevate a simple story. But by simply telling a small story of an ordinary man wrapped in a grand fantasy setting, it represents a commendable attempt at capturing the life of someone who really does contain multitudes—and whose story is worth telling.
