Charles Krantz is not extraordinary in any discernible way, yet he is wonderful all the same. He shares this distinction with Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella “The Life of Chuck”, an achingly earnest reverse linear expedition into the joys, sorrows, and slow destruction of one Mr. Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), a mild-mannered accountant with a quiet lust for life and a knack for dancing. A story tucked into the inner folds of one of King’s more recent short story collections, “If It Bleeds”, “The Life of Chuck” is not a horror story, yet it terrifies. It is a joyous experience, yet I spent more of the film crying than not. It is a triumph of tone and filmmaking, and yet might be the most faithful adaptation of King’s work ever put to the screen. It is a contradiction for a film to be this hopeful in a time when the world seems most bleak, yet in spite of it all, “The Life of Chuck” exists, and that is wonderful.
Told in reverse chronological order through the short life of Charles Krantz, “The Life of Chuck” begins at Act Three as Earth is beginning to be ripped apart at the delicate seams which humanity has been yanking indiscriminately for centuries. The internet is gone across the world, California is falling into the ocean, there are wildfires in Cleveland, a sinkhole has opened out of nowhere, and, for some reason, a man named Charles Krantz has billboards and TV ads thanking him for 39 great years. Our characters in this chunk of the story, including a school teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his ex-wife (Karen Gillan), have no idea who Charles Krantz is or why he warrants such celebration as the universe cracks open beneath them. At one point, Ejiofor tries to turn his attention from the chaos on the news and watch a musical on TV (“Swing Time” with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, I believe), only for the screen to blink out and flash to another advertisement for Mr. Krantz and his 39 great years. Charles Krantz is inevitable, and there is no escaping the inevitable.
Courtesy of Neon
Act Two flashes us back to nine months previous, when Charles Krantz, a mild-mannered accountant on a business trip, stops to dance with a drumming busker on a street corner. His dance is impulsive and exuberant, soon joined by a stranger, a young woman recently dumped via text message. Charles asks her to dance, calling her “Little Sister,” and together, they twist and spin as onlookers watch in awe, their movements in sync yet seemingly without choreography. Their souls are afire, and their feet are simply working to keep up with the blaze. It is a simple sequence, filmed without grand cinematic embellishment because it doesn’t need it. Charles Krantz’s dance is not for us; it is for him, reawakening memories, and horrors, and loves long lost deep inside him. It is a reminder that he is alive, as are we who bear witness to it. For being the star of the film, Hiddleston has little dialogue, yet speaks volumes with his movements. The cosmic scales of existence and nothingness hang in balance in every twitch of Hiddleston’s smile, the way he closes his eyes and taps his fingers to the beat. In that moment, he is one with all things that are and were and will be. He is present. He is joy. And so are we.
Act One is Chuck’s childhood, one of loss, salvation, and waiting. Orphaned after the death of his parents and yet to be born little sister, Chuck lives with his grandparents (Mia Sara and Mark Hamill), in a large Victorian house with a locked cupola which he is forbidden to enter. Chuck does a lot of growing up in that house; he learns to dance from his grandmother, and his grandfather drunkenly reveals that there are ghosts in the cupola, not from the past but perhaps of the future. At school, Chuck joins a dancing club where he finds he has an innate ability for finding the groove and riding its wave while a kind teacher (Kate Siegel) explains to the curious boy the concept at the heart of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. “I am large, I contain multitudes”, Whitman says, a sentiment proposing that perhaps each of us holds vast universes inside our minds, worlds formed from every person we’ve met, every experience we’ve shared, and every love we’ve lost. As Chuck grows, and loss compounds around him, it’s clear he has a date with the ghosts cooped up inside the cupola; with a truth all children must learn and adults often drink to forget. There’s only one destination on life’s roller coaster; we just never know how long we’re along for the ride. Sometimes it ends after a year, sometimes after thirty-nine great ones. But it always ends. As Young Chuck learns, it’s the waiting that’s the hard part.
It’s difficult to pinpoint what about “The Life of Chuck” is so affecting, what causes its simple observations of life and death to impact readers and now audience members with the force of a sledgehammer to the heart. While there is happiness in Charles Krantz’s life, there are equal parts sadness. Each Act, in its own way, is bookended with the death of something precious and pure to each of us. We all share this with Charles Krantz, a simple man burdened with containing multitudes and dancing all the same as the world comes crashing down around him. It’s hard not to see the parallels of our current reality crumbling in real time. Even now, thousands of lives around the world are being destroyed through genocide, incarceration, or forced deportation; lives which contain universes all their own that are being ripped unceremoniously from all they know and hold dear as if those multitudes mattered not one bit. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left watching stars blink from the sky one by one as the doomsday clock of civilization ticks closer and closer to midnight, and we tepidly look for a way to continue living despite knowing what is to come. The waiting really is the hard part, to sit beneath blackening skies and try to express our love for each other before the lights go dark forever. What else is there to do in the face of oblivion than dance? Where else would we rather be than at the full breath of our soul’s abilities to express joy and humanity? At the intersection of despair and rapture, is there any place more human? Any idea more universal?
Like most of us, Charles Krantz was not an extraordinary person, yet he was wonderful. His life was not a loud one, yet he shook the foundation of those around him, allowing them to savor the enormity that was him. “I will live my life until my life runs out. I am wonderful. I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes,” Young Chuck says as he sees what was waiting for him in the haunted cupola. If that’s not a song worth dancing to, I don’t know what is.
There hasn’t been a movie quite like “The Life of Chuck” in a good long while; one of hope and pain that does not blink from what’s to come, a movie that holds out its beating heart and asks that you consider it your own. I could not recommend this movie more highly. So do yourself a favor and pay Chuck a visit to thank him for thirty-nine great years.
You’ll be glad you did.
“The Life of Chuck” is playing at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
