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Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘The Life of Chuck' is an apocalyptic, soul-seeking puzzle that's missing a few pieces
How narcissistic to believe you're living in the end times. The thought might cross your mind — I'm guilty of it, sure — but it can be chased off by imagining how it felt to witness the Dust Bowl or the French Revolution or the fall of Tenochtitlan. 'The Life of Chuck,' a sentimental jigsaw puzzle by Mike Flanagan ('Doctor Sleep') from a 50-page 2020 novella by Stephen King, argues the opposite. Here, in this backward-structured triptych of short tales, the death of an ordinary accountant, Chuck Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), is the end times, at least for the characters in his head. Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan) and their friends and co-workers don't know their catastrophic existence is merely a dying man's reverie. Their reality is that the Earth is collapsing, even as every surface is suddenly covered with confounding billboards and commercials thanking whoever some Chuck is for '39 great years.' Of what? No one knows. 'He's our last meme,' Marty jokes. In Chuck years, the film starts when he's 39 and in his final hours of fading away from brain cancer, rewinds to nine months earlier and then leaps back to his boyhood. As the film trudges from his hospice bed to his youth, we'll come to see that the doomed townsfolk have the same faces and mannerisms of people Chuck knew as a child. It's a heartening, humanistic thesis that even a rather dull dude like Chuck has an inner life that rivals 'The Iliad.' Paradoxically, that way of thinking belongs specifically to storytellers like King, who make up whole yarns about anonymous humans on the street. My mental landscape may just be grocery lists and song lyrics. To emphasize its timeline, the movie titles its first section Act Three. The book did the same thing. 'The Life of Chuck' is a nearly line-by-line faithful adaptation, with a few more jokes and heavy use of a narrator, Nick Offerman, who reads King's words with a nature documentarian's gusto. Originally, King was inspired only to write the middle-aged Chuck chapters, and then a year later he bound those pieces together by adding the boyhood kicker and its superfluous supernatural element. In his author's note, King said he'd leave the success of his narrative architecture 'up to readers to determine.' Well, it doesn't work. But I can see why he tried the rearrangement. The closing section has the most Chuck, which makes it the most banal. An orphan who lives with his grandparents, Albie and Sarah (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara), Chuck pads through a rather milquetoast coming-of-age sketch. He endures loss, visits his neighbor Vera (Heather Langenkamp) and along the line learns to waltz, samba and moonwalk. (Young Chuck is played at various ages by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay.) He also discovers a mystical portal at the top of the stairs that the script doesn't satisfyingly explore. Instead, it simply muddles the everyman point of the film. If you started the movie at the end, you wouldn't be champing to find out what happens next. But the apocalyptic opening act is pretty great. For 15 minutes, nearly every line of dialogue could be an elevator pitch for a Roland Emmerich movie: earthquakes in California, volcanoes in Germany, a nuclear meltdown in Japan. All these calamities are happening simultaneously — so many disasters coming at such speed that the bad news slams into Marty like a psychological avalanche. Luckily, the internet is also glitching, causing a vicarious thrill when Marty quits trying to get service and throws away his phone. There's a stand-out scene where Matthew Lillard, playing Marty's acquaintance Gus, advises him to take a detour to work as a sinkhole has just opened up on the road to his commute. Twenty drivers are trapped at the bottom, some of whom, Gus says nonchalantly, are 'probably not coming out.' The incomprehensibility of it all, of every awful thing wreaking havoc at once, has Gus in a state of jocular shock. Until almost without him aware of it, a tear slips loose. We don't see much of this destruction on-screen. Flanagan is strictly interested in what futility does to the human soul — and how it can be a salve, too. By his reckoning, suicide and marriage rates will rise. Gillan's Felicia, who is both a despondent nurse and a lonely divorcée, nicely illustrates why. I'm inclined to believe him, and it's also a gas to eavesdrop on Marty's parent-teacher conferences, where the adults no longer give a flying fig about their kids' futures. One dad (David Dastmalchian) spends the session whining about his inability to pull up internet porn. Mood-wise, this first section is magnificently done (although the celestial spa-music score by the Newton Brothers is a twinkle too much). In the spirit of schadenfreude, I'd have happily watched a whole additional hour of this Chuck-driven armageddon where, as his body collapses, the stars in the sky blink out one by one. Pity as its title character gains health, the film loses its verve. The second act is a likable, fragile bubble of an idea. One afternoon before his terminal diagnosis, the adult Chuck takes a stroll and spontaneously dazzles a crowd with a dance number done in wordless alliance with two strangers, a lovelorn book clerk (Annalise Basso) and a street drummer (Taylor Gordon). The performance is elaborate and delightful and impeccably choreographed, with Hiddleston doing long-legged strides as though he's the second coming of Christopher Walken. Like the film's central conceit, it's about making magic out of the mundane. Shrewdly, once the exuberance ends, Flanagan lets the blahs back in. The musical trio regresses into that awkwardness of knowing they've shared a special moment, but there isn't much left to say to each other besides so long and good luck. The movie has a key advantage over the book. Flanagan can visually emphasize that Chuck's mind contains a universe of memories. For starters, he's double-cast many of the actors; tragic Marty was once a teacher who young Chuck spotted in the hall. (To my disappointment, we never spot Lillard and Dastmalchian again.) But even the casting itself deliberately tugs on our own memories. An unusual number of the supporting players are beloved for one famous role — not just big parts, but eternal parts — that have so immortalized them in the public's consciousness that their fictional identities have supplanted their real ones. Hamill, of course, was in 'Star Wars,' Sara in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off,' Langenkamp in 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' and Lillard in 'Scream.' If it was just one or two icons, you might not bat an eye. But at this concentration, the film itself is making a statement even to the most grocery list-minded of us. There are faces who will live in our brains until we die. As philosophical puzzles go, 'The Life of Chuck' doesn't add up to much. But I'm glad I saw it for one reason. A few days later, I was recounting the plot to a friend at a Koreatown steakhouse that had just opened for the afternoon. We were alone in a back booth when the waiter approached and said he'd overheard us mention moonwalking. He hit play on his phone and began to pop and lock and, yes, attempt to moonwalk on the carpet. Thinking of the message of the movie — that these might ultimately be the only moments that matter — I forced myself to stand up and join him in doing the robot. Together, we made magic out of the mundane and it was marvelous.
New York Times
08-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
At the Biennale in Venice, a Fantasy Island Imported from Mexico
Mexico City's small urban farms — known locally as chinampas — practice a sort of agriculture in reverse: instead of bringing water to land as most farms do, chinampas bring land to water. The chinampas in use today go back about a thousand years, to when Aztec farmers began building rectangular fields on top of vast lakes and growing food for what was then the city of Tenochtitlan. There were tens of thousands of chinampas at one point, arranged in strict grids with narrow canals between them, though many were destroyed or abandoned (along with the rest of the Mesoamerican metropolis) after Hernán Cortés and his invading Spanish soldiers rearranged the civic order in 1521. But working chinampas continue to exist in the southern Mexico City neighborhood of Xochimilco — despite continuing encroachment by developers and competition from factory farms — operating mostly as family businesses that produce heirloom lettuce, radishes, dahlias and other crops. Lately, the farms' irrigation-friendly ways are getting fresh attention in a world rocked by climate change and suffering from widespread droughts. Could other places around the globe borrow the idea of creating 'floating islands,' as the fields are sometimes called, which are engulfed by water? A team of Mexican designers, landscapers and farmers believes the ancient technology may be widely adaptable, enough that they will recreate a chinampa for their country's pavilion at this year's Architecture Biennale in Venice. 'Chinampas have a simple and intelligent design, created in a collective way that benefits not only people but all of the surrounding living beings, too,' said Lucio Usobiaga, a team member who has spent the last 15 years defending the remaining chinampas through a nonprofit he founded called Arca Tierra. Mexico's pavilion is a neat fit for the biennial's main exhibition, 'Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective,' which is intended to show design projects that address climate change in creative ways. The chinampas are at once man-made and organic and can succeed only if there is cooperation among farmers, policymakers and the growing number of tourists who float through on popular canoe tours, gazing at fields of corn and flocks of egrets and pelicans. Promoting the chinampa as an inspiration for eco-friendly design was an obvious choice for the biennale, team members said. 'Venice is also built on water and has the same kind of vulnerabilities that Xochimilco has,' noted Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo, a founder of the design firm Pedro y Juana. They pointed out that Venice and Xochimilco were added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites in the same year, 1987, and both places are island communities navigable by boats and working to balance the positive and negative aspects of tourism. Venice has its iconic gondolas, while Xochimilco has its trajineras, flat-bottomed vessels, decorated in bright colors and fake flowers that take visitors on party-themed excursions. Both boats are operated by pilots who push them along channels using long poles. As for how to recreate a chinampa on-site, that took some imagination. And compromise. The Aztecs constructed their islands over time, using reeds and branches to make fences in the mucky lake bottom. These formed boundaries for multiple layers of sediment and decaying vegetation (and sometimes human sewerage) until the islands rose far enough above water to be farmed. In addition to growing crops like corn, beans and squash — using the traditional milpa agricultural method that naturally preserves nutrients in soil — they planted trees on the corners of the islands to stabilize the land. Mexico's pavilion, inside the biennale's Arsenale complex, will feature a stripped-down version, much smaller than the 500 square meters (0.12 acres) of a typical chinampa. The exhibition will be enhanced by videos produced in Mexico City featuring real chinamperos, as the farmers are called, and bleachers will be installed along the walls. Artificial lighting will replace sunshine. In the center will be a working garden planted with vegetables, flowers and medicinal herbs. (The crops were started in an Italian nursery and transferred to the Arsenale by boat in mid-April.) They will mature during the biennale, which continues through Nov. 23. 'By the end of the biennale, we will be able to harvest corn and make tortillas,' said Mr. Usobiaga. 'Before that, we can harvest beans, squash, tomatoes and chiles.' Visitors will learn about special seed cultivation techniques that are unique to chinampas and will have the chance to plant seedlings themselves. In a nod to local agriculture, the chinampa will also employ a version of vite maritata, a practice established in ancient Etruscan agriculture that calls for planting grapes around trees, which serve as a natural trellis system for the vines. The exhibition team sees a link between the two forms of agro-forestry, combining trees and crops into one ecosystem. 'We are going to see this dialogue between two ancient cultures that both have a lot to say about how we can move forward,' Mr. Usobiaga said. The exhibition team members said they wanted to be careful not to overly romanticize chinampas because they are not easy to duplicate on a scale that could feed a large population today. The farms work in Mexico City because they sit on a lake that lacks an outlet to another body of water, making water levels relatively easy to control. The opposite is true, of course, in Venice, which is on a lagoon close to the sea and always under threat from flooding. Also, the economics of small farms — high production costs, low yields because of their size — make it difficult to turn a profit. Farmworker wages are generally too low to support people in urban areas, and the backbreaking work of planting and harvesting has lost prestige. 'This is a big problem here, that people, especially young people, don't want to work the soil on chinampas anymore,' said María Marín de Buen, the team's graphic designer. Even in Xochimilco, many chinampas lie fallow because their owners cannot make a living. Some have been turned into soccer fields, which are rented out to the community; others are event venues where people celebrate weddings or birthday parties. Officially, the land is restricted from development, as well as from cattle grazing and the hunting of endangered animal species, though these things happen with alarming frequency. Still, the team sees something inspirational at play: a connection between nature and the built environment, between existing water resources and the need to construct houses and schools. Architects who visit the biennale may not go on to design large swaths of farmland, but they can replicate the idea on a smaller scale using whatever conditions exist, said Jachen Schleich, a team member who is a principal of the Mexico City architectural firm Dellekamp + Schleich. 'Even if somebody does this in his backyard, he can at least feed his family, or the people on the four floors of his building, Mr. Schleich said. 'It could be like a micro-intervention in the landscape or a public space.'
