It’s the end of the world as we know it, or at least that’s how it seems in “The Life of Chuck.” A strange, feel-good fantasy about the end times, the movie traces a loose network of characters going about life while facing multiple personal and planetary catastrophes. When the story opens, Earth’s big clock, a.k.a. life itself, seems close to running out: Cataclysmic disasters, both natural and otherwise, are raging worldwide, species are rapidly going extinct, people are checking out and the internet is about to do the same. That’s bad, though given our enduring connectivity issues, it can also seem like just another day on Planet Reality.
“The Life of Chuck” is a curious movie, starting with its relatively relaxed, almost blasé attitude toward extinction of any kind. It uneasily mixes moods and tones, softens tragedies with smiles and foregrounds a title character — Chuck, an accountant with a tragic past, played as an adult by Tom Hiddleston — who has a tenuous hold on both the story and your interest. Chuck is present from the start but only comes to something like life midway through. He has a kid and is happily married, at least according to the narrator (Nick Offerman), whose dry, lightly detached voice-over winds throughout. That the narrator proves to be a more vivid presence than Chuck is another oddity, one that’s presumably unintentional.
Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, the movie is based on a vaporous three-part novella by Stephen King, also titled “The Life of Chuck,” that’s included in the author’s 2020 collection “If It Bleeds.” Flanagan’s adaptation is scrupulously, unwisely faithful to the source material. As in King’s tale, the movie unfolds in three sections in reverse chronological order. Also as in the original, Chuck first appears on a billboard that doesn’t seem to be selling anything. It just features a photo of a suited Chuck at a desk smiling out at the world, a mug in one hand, a pencil in the other. “39 Great Years!,” the billboard reads. “Thanks Chuck!”
The billboard catches the eye of the movie’s most fully realized character, Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the focal point of the disaster-ridden inaugural chapter. A schoolteacher whose slight connection to Chuck emerges much later, Marty is dutifully plugging away in class despite the world’s looming end. “I contain multitudes,” one of his students unpersuasively reads from the Walt Whitman poem “Song of Myself.” Given everyone’s palpable listlessness, Marty’s included, T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” would probably have been too on the nose: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”
A sensitive, appealing performer, Ejiofor is a master of melancholy, and he gets the movie off to a fine start. His soft face and large, plaintive eyes naturally draw you to him, but even when they water, as directors like them to do, it’s Ejiofor’s talent for emotional nuance and depth that holds your gaze. That skill is particularly useful for characters as vaguely conceived as Marty, a nice, lonely guy who’s still close to his ex, Felicia (Karen Gillan). There’s not much to either character or their relationship, but Ejiofor fills in Marty with dabs of personality and a sense of decency that suggests that while humanity is lost, not every individual is. It’s too bad the movie doesn’t stick with Marty, who warms it up appreciably.
Instead, it shifts back in time before the world’s imminent finale to Hiddleston’s Chuck on a business trip. He’s attractive, to be sure, but soon proves disappointingly underdeveloped, particularly given how much weight — metaphysical and otherwise — he shoulders in a story that teasingly pokes at questions about the nature of reality, the cosmos and human consciousness. Amid the movie’s swirl of ideas and images (enter Carl Sagan as well as Gene Kelly), Chuck makes some moves, including during a spontaneous street dance. Choreographed by Mandy Moore, the dance makes the most of Hiddleston’s lean line and the liquid gracefulness that he likes showing off on talk shows. Yet as nice as it is to watch Chuck shimmy, his inner life, such as it is, is better articulated by the narrator.
That’s scarcely on Hiddleston, who doesn’t have a lot of dialogue or as much to do as the actors who play Chuck during his tragedy-plagued childhood and adolescence, which bring the movie to its fuzzy close. These three (the director’s son Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay) are persuasive in moments, but the character in aggregate never adds up. As the young Chuck keeps pluckily going and thriving despite enduring the deaths of many beloveds, both the character and the movie become progressively unconvincing, absurd. It might be comforting, at least for some, to watch movie characters who suffer unspeakable losses — of a parent, of an entire world — land as lightly on their feet as Chuck does when he spins and twirls. But some fairy tales are better left on the page.
The Life of Chuck
Rated R for multiple deaths and apocalyptic scenes. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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