What Stephen King’s horror stories share with his non-horror stories are carefully constructed narratives based on humanist impulses. His characters, even the ones who are nominally evil, present with traits that everyone can easily identify and maybe even empathize with. Or maybe I should say that these characters present with traits that Americans can easily identify and even empathize with; which isn’t a complaint, since King has proven to be popular the world over. It’s just that his voice has always had a peculiarly Yankee accent in the most edifying sense, a force for democratic egalitarianism without the browbeating tone Americans are infamous for. The Life of Chuck, based on a short story that King published less than ten years ago, straddles his two fictional forms without fully committing to either, so all that’s left is the humanism dressed up as cryptic fantasy.

The title character, an accountant named Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), is introduced in the opening section in a series of weird billboards and TV commercials thanking him for his service of 39 years as the world is literally coming to an end, with earthquakes dropping California into the Pacific, sinkholes opening up willy-nilly, and all communication infrastructure failing. The overarching sense of doom forces two former lovers (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan) to reconnect as everything falls apart and the smiling face of Chuck persists in the background, as if watching over them. In the second section, which takes place in the same generically American suburban setting, we meet Chuck in the flesh as he saunters through a Disneyfied small town square after attending a bookkeepers convention. Passing a busker doing a solo performance on drums, he breaks into an Astaire-like dance that charms everyone else on the street, some of whom look familiar from the first section. Then, in the last, longest section, we find out how Chuck learned to dance so well as an adolescent (Benjamin Pajak, who eventually turns into Jacob Tremblay) and why he chose accountancy over the terpsichorean life, mostly due to the counsel of his kind but firm grandfather (Mark Hamill). By this time, anyone versed in the niceties of Hollywood fantasy films like It’s a Wonderful Life and especially those familiar with King’s typical moralistic m.o. will have figured out how to tie the three disparate chapters together, but the director, Mike Flanagan, keeps you guessing until the last moment what exactly it all means.

It means a lot; or, at least, it’s supposed to. Since Chuck’s insightfully average middle class American life is dictated by a kind of hybrid pop cosmology—a combination of Carl Sagan and Walt Whitman, both of whom are quoted extensively in the script—it’s difficult to commit fully to its existential purposes. Many people have been seriously moved by The Life of Chuck, and it’s hard to deny King’s and Flanagan’s skill at explicating the worth of a single individual, but it comes across more as a metaphor for a life rather than a recreation of one, and there’s a difference. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

The Life of Chuck home page in Japanese

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