"The Life of Chuck"

  ☆☆☆½ 

It seems so long ago, but it wasn't, that TV commercials used to be slick affairs with significant budget, little 30-second movies unto themselves. They could make us cry. Back when we used to care enough to send the very best or to reach out and touch someone, commericals about parents and children — or, especially, grandparents and children — were enough to make grown people teary.

Here we are in the ad-free-tier 21st century, when commercials tell us we smell or we need pharmaceutical intervention for diseases we never imagined we could have. Trying to make us cry with sappy sentimentalism is no longer the purview of advertisers.

Leave it, then, to Stephen King. Yes, the conjurer of nightmares is an old softie at heart (something, to be fair, we've known at least since Stand By Me), and he is the master manipulator behind The Life of Chuck, which began as a novella-length short story and now is a movie from the man who directed Doctor Sleep.

I wasn't a fan of Doctor Sleep. which struck me as dull and reverential. The Life of Chuck is reverential, though it's never dull, but its sentimentality has about as much depth as those old commercials. It involves parents and children — and, especially, grandparents and children — and at times it is enough to make grown people teary.

Yet it earns those tears about as fairly as the ads did. It takes a hard heart to watch (this will seem like a spoiler, but isn't) a dying person wish for more life, to watch his family cry for him, and not feel something.

The Life of Chuck is about a dying man whose story is told roughly backward, from the actual moment of his death through to his youth. It's got an interesting structure, and even though I knew the basic contours of the plot (as most people likely will) going in, the first third of the movie was incongruous and puzzling enough to draw my attention. Chiewetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillen star in the first third, playing engaging but weirdly anonymous who are living through some odd sort of apocalypse in which the strange presence of a man named Chuck plays a vital role.

The second third tells us more about Chuck (mostly played by Tom Hiddleston, also weirdly anonymous), and the third third tells us about Chuck as a youngster, when he learned to dance — a fact that makes the second third much more interesting in retrospect.

It's a curious and almost-effective structure, with genuine pathos in the second third that is largely undone by a final act that — despite the animated presence of Mark Hamill — is unexpectedly anodyne and inert. The last couple of shots should wrap everything up, but don't; and the movie, which already feels long, seems to be truncated.

None of which is to imply that The Life of Chuck is bad or not recommended. It's worth seeing, but only just, and only by those who don't easily get toothaches from sweet things. It's very sweet. Very, very sweet. So sweet, it might make you cry just a little ... and maybe want to brush your teeth after.

Viewed June 19, 2025 – AMC Topanga 12

2015