Joyce Glasser reviews The Life of Chuck (20 August 2025) Cert 15 110 mins.
Tom Hiddleston, who co-starred in the Marvel comic adaptation Thor, in the thriller, The Night Manager and in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, also played the singer Hank Williams in I Saw the Light (2016). In that film, in which his character dies at 29, we heard Hiddleston sing convincingly. In Stephen King afficionado (Gerald’s Game, 2017 and Doctor Sleep, 2019) Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, we see Hiddleston dance (in a sequence which consumes most of his screen time) and die (off screen) at the age of 39.
Chuck’s dying moments spawn a multitude of billboards and digital announcements all over a New England town (references to the Red Sox are the clue) in which the bemused, inhabitants are already experiencing end-of-the-word panic. Sink holes appear, the internet is down, suicides are up and news of California’s food belt collapsing into the sea are reported before the municipal lights go out.
The billboards show the image of Charles Krantz, a successful looking banker-type seated at his desk with the tag line, ’39 Great Years! Thanks Chuck! This is what English teacher Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) talks about with his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan) with whom he is still very close. Who is this Chuck and why is his overblown presence blighting their final hours on earth?
That these negative impressions of Chuck Krantz are dispelled, and the reason why this mysterious Chuck’s 39 Great Years are destroying a town’s (or the country’s) final hours is explained over the course of the next two chapters in the film that, like King’s short story, is divided into three chapters or theatrical “acts”. The acts are narrated by – yes, this is a literal adaptation – Nick Offerman and, crucially, told in verse chronological order.
Act Three, which opens the film, is entitled, Thanks, Chuck which sounds ironic, as this is the apocalyptic end of the world. As it comes out of context, and, as we know too little about the characters to care about them, it becomes rather tedious.
Act Two, is far more entertaining because almost the entire act is taken up by Charles (Hiddleston), a successful banker arriving in Boston for a work conference, and during a break, impulsively starts to dance to a busker’s (Taylor Gordon) drum. The busker steps up to the challenge of this odd sight, and soon a crowd gathers.
Amongst the onlookers is Janice Halliday (Annalise Basso) an attractive young woman heading to a date after work who learns via text that her boyfriend has dumped her. When Chuck reaches out his hand to Janice, she surprises herself by joining in. They are the Fred and Ginger of the hour and Taylor’s hat is overflowing with dollar bills.
In Act One we learn about Chuck’s formative years, when after losing his parents in an accident, he is brought up by his grandparents (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara) who are given a lot more screen time relative to their lines in the story. In this act, three talented young actors portray Chuck including, in reverse chronological order, Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay (Room). Clearly the producer’s wanted their money’s worth of Hamill as unlike the original story, here his character dominates, drowning his sorrows for his son’s death in drink, persuading dance loving Chuck to study mathematics, and referring to an off-bounds mysterious attic room.
But it is his grandmother’s penchant for dancing with young Chuck in the kitchen and teaching him all the basics, that touches us and her grandson, encouraging him to join a school dance club where’s he needs heels to reach the club’s best dancer, popular Cat McCoy (Trinity Bliss). The draw of this Act for the viewer is Pajak’s dancing. In a scene mirroring the Chuck/Janice dance in Act Two, Pajak wows students and teachers alike at a prom dancing with Cat, whose tall, beefy boyfriend is jealous.
The concept uniting the seemingly disjointed Act Three, and the biographical Act Two and One is a poem that lingers in young Chuck’s mind when frustrated new teacher (Kate Siegel) vainly attempts to teach Section 51 of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to an incurious class. For our benefit as much as Chuck’s, the grateful teacher explains the famous phrase, ‘I contain multitudes,’ which sticks with Chuck on his death bed.
Having previously directed Stephen King adaptations, Gerald’s Game in 2017 and Doctor Sleep in 2019, Flanagan is clearly an aficionado. It’s a shame that he is so faithful to King that he does not make the most of the medium of film to help make the concept fit the narrative. Act Three (the first “scene”) should be hovering over the first two Acts as in film, at least, the reverse chronological order does not work.
Section 51 of Whitman’s long poem was inspired by a key idea in Whitman’s mentor, the New England philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…’ and goes on to conclude that ‘to be great is to be misunderstood’. Chuck is misunderstood by those awaiting the end of the world, and his inconsistency is, rather obviously, the apparent dichotomy (seen in his grandparents) between Chuck’s love of dance, and his successful career as an accountant. These are the multitudes Chuck contains, not necessarily a life incorporating Marty and Karen.
