Life Affirming

We went to see a movie yesterday, first because it was Sunday and that’s what we tend to do on Sundays, but also because we wanted to do something out of the house with visiting friends Gary & Oswaldo. Oh, and by the way, it was also Fathers Day. We had had a nice weekend with them, but other than going to Kim’s show for a few hours, we hadn’t much gotten out of the house. So, this was not about going to see a movie we had all heard so much about, but rather about finding a movie that would be worth going to. We settled on The Life of Chuck, which had only relatively obscure actors in it, but was based on a short story written recently by Steven King. For a movie that none of us had heard about, its reviews were quite startling. My favorite comment about it was “One of the most profoundly beautiful films ever made.” Endorsements don’t get much stronger than that, although “An absolute miracle…a masterpiece” comes close.

Since it was Fathers Day, I chose to preempt the calls from my children and called my son Roger and daughter Carolyn. They had each already acknowledged the occasion by sending me cards and/or gifts, so I knew that a touch-base call was all that was needed to make everyone feel right with the world. My youngest son, Thomas and his wife Jenna had flown off for a week of vacation in Iceland the day before, so he had called me to give me an advance salutation for Fathers Day and followed that with a nice text, so I didn’t expect a call from him from their camper van out on the tundra. But he did call, which was nice. They had already done the Blue Lagoon hot springs and the Golden Circle around Reykjavik (both of which Kim and I have done), so we had a few laughs about that. He dutifully asked what I was doing on this Fathers Day and I told him I was going to see some movie about Chuck. Apparently, before leaving for Iceland they had found time to go see The Life of Chuck, so perhaps it was not as obscure as I had thought. His comment about the movie was that it was very upbeat and life affirming. That seemed consistent with its billing and started to make me feel that the movie would be a real treat. I felt that it had been a weekend of worrying about the state of our country and national psyche, so the theme was that this might be something we all needed at this time. Life affirmation at a moment of existential angst seemed just right. Others in our group did bits and pieces of online research and were finding the same reaction to the movie, so we all went in expecting the best.

Occasionally a movie comes out that tries to be cute in using temporal shifting to tell its story. I am not talking about H.G. Wells time travel or obvious Back to the Future stuff, but rather movies that purposefully mess around with the viewers’ minds by playing themselves either in reverse or with some specific sense that time is less sequential than random. Movies like Memento, Interstellar and Tenet come to mind and to be honest, I don’t care for them. These are the movies that I skip past when looking for something to see over again. It takes a lot for me to choose to skip over a movie, so it’s safe to say I really don’t like the whole temporal shifting scenario. I was not a fan of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button either for that matter. After the opening scene of The Life of Chuck, they announced on the screen that that was Act III. That did not make me happy because I knew I had stumbled into a time warp movie. Sure enough, we proceeded to go through Act II and only then Act I. It’s not that its too much to keep track of, or at least wasn’t in this case, its that I have no clue what value this reversal does for the storytelling. That is fundamentally my problem. I am a fan of the story, not necessarily a fan of the way in which the director chooses to tell the story, especially if its in reverse order.

If that were the only problem I had with the movie, I might have made it through with dispassion, but that was only the beginning. Right before the movie, someone in our group suggested that it was going to be a science fiction film. I’m not a SciFi fan either, so that comment made me wince. But this was not Dune-type SciFi, it was more like The Truman Show sort of campy SciFi. It was set in a somewhat idyllic suburban community and it involved normal and diverse people who all seemed more or less well-educated. In other words, it was only so realistic. And that’s when it started getting weird. The storyline was that the world was coming to an inexplicable end, not so dramatically, but sort of step by step. A large chunk of Northern California had somehow disappeared (as in fallen into the ocean) and eventually most of the rest of California followed it, leaving Nevada as the most populous state in the nation, what with all the emigrating Californians. No explanations for these extinction events was ever given or even asked for by the victims who’s lives we were following for the moment. It was all presumed to be some eventual eco-disaster end of the world scenario that was obvious and needed no explanation.

Overlaying the fundamental end of the world storyline was a life story of this guy Chuck, who we know from Act III is dying while the earth is dying. The foundational principles at play are laid out as the famous Carl Sagan explanation of time in the context of the universe. If the universe started in the first second of January 1, mankind only showed up on the cosmic calendar at 10:30pm on December 31. It was during those last 90 minutes of man’s existence that everything happened that we we have in our human consciousness and that we are seeing on the screen. In other words, man’s part in the story of the universe is basically insignificant. He is but a flyspeck on the calendar of creation and nothing that he has done, is doing or will do really matters.

So, one evening, Chuck is walking home from his day of accountancy and he engages in a random dance on the sidewalk with an unknown woman at the behest of some other woman who is playing a drum solo. Chuck turns out to be a a good dancer who has wanted to dance his whole life. He has been raised by his grandparents, his grandfather being an accountant and his grandmother being a free-spirited dancer. Their home has a locked Victorian cupola which is the Steven King special kind of room that shows people who enter the future. At one point Chuck sees his own fate of dying of some tragic disease at age 39. None of this makes any sense and far too much of it connects between the two storylines but is unexplained to us simple-minded viewers. And that was it. That may be Steven King’s version of life affirming, but what I saw was end-of-world dystopia and the vastness of man’s insignificance all bundled up into the unhappy life of this guy Chuck who must have been some sort of God figure. All that affirms in me is that Steven King has either or both a bigger or weirder brain than mine.