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New York Times
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Life of Chuck' Review: Don't Worry, Be Happy
It's the end of the world as we know it, or at least that's how it seems in 'The Life of Chuck.' A strange, feel-good fantasy about the end times, the movie traces a loose network of characters going about life while facing multiple personal and planetary catastrophes. When the story opens, Earth's big clock, a.k.a. life itself, seems close to running out: Cataclysmic disasters, both natural and otherwise, are raging worldwide, species are rapidly going extinct, people are checking out and the internet is about to do the same. That's bad, though given our enduring connectivity issues, it can also seem like just another day on Planet Reality. 'The Life of Chuck' is a curious movie, starting with its relatively relaxed, almost blasé attitude toward extinction of any kind. It uneasily mixes moods and tones, softens tragedies with smiles and foregrounds a title character — Chuck, an accountant with a tragic past, played as an adult by Tom Hiddleston — who has a tenuous hold on both the story and your interest. Chuck is present from the start but only comes to something like life midway through. He has a kid and is happily married, at least according to the narrator (Nick Offerman), whose dry, lightly detached voice-over winds throughout. That the narrator proves to be a more vivid presence than Chuck is another oddity, one that's presumably unintentional. Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, the movie is based on a vaporous three-part novella by Stephen King, also titled 'The Life of Chuck,' that's included in the author's 2020 collection 'If It Bleeds.' Flanagan's adaptation is scrupulously, unwisely faithful to the source material. As in King's tale, the movie unfolds in three sections in reverse chronological order. Also as in the original, Chuck first appears on a billboard that doesn't seem to be selling anything. It just features a photo of a suited Chuck at a desk smiling out at the world, a mug in one hand, a pencil in the other. '39 Great Years!,' the billboard reads. 'Thanks Chuck!' The billboard catches the eye of the movie's most fully realized character, Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the focal point of the disaster-ridden inaugural chapter. A schoolteacher whose slight connection to Chuck emerges much later, Marty is dutifully plugging away in class despite the world's looming end. 'I contain multitudes,' one of his students unpersuasively reads from the Walt Whitman poem 'Song of Myself.' Given everyone's palpable listlessness, Marty's included, T.S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men' would probably have been too on the nose: 'This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.' A sensitive, appealing performer, Ejiofor is a master of melancholy, and he gets the movie off to a fine start. His soft face and large, plaintive eyes naturally draw you to him, but even when they water, as directors like them to do, it's Ejiofor's talent for emotional nuance and depth that holds your gaze. That skill is particularly useful for characters as vaguely conceived as Marty, a nice, lonely guy who's still close to his ex, Felicia (Karen Gillan). There's not much to either character or their relationship, but Ejiofor fills in Marty with dabs of personality and a sense of decency that suggests that while humanity is lost, not every individual is. It's too bad the movie doesn't stick with Marty, who warms it up appreciably. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Irish Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Water in the Desert Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick: An ambitious, inventive and stirring debut novel about everything
Water in the Desert Fire in the Night Author : Gethan Dick ISBN-13 : 9781915290168 Publisher : Tramp Press Guideline Price : £14 How do you write the end of the world? It's a question many authors and artists have asked themselves, from HG Wells and Cormac McCarthy to REM. Of course, no one is really interested in rendering the end of the world in art. At the end of the world, there is no art. Looking into the abyss, we see only things that make sense to the living, and those who write of oblivion are usually trying to make sense of life itself – they write about an impending end; or the end of someone else's world; or the end of an old world to make way for a new. In Gethan Dick's ambitious, inventive, and stirring debut novel, the characters have lived, oxymoronically, beyond the end of the world. We find them – an Irish Rastafarian named Pressure Drop; a retired midwife named Sarah; a neoliberal couple named Joy and Trevor; a young student named Adi; and our narrator, a multilingual music roadie named Audaz – in a series of railway arches in postapocalyptic London. They are the 'living, breathing afterparty' of the world as it once was, surviving off the 'all too much' left over from a previously hyper-consumerist society. (The arches, now abandoned, were a Chinese supermarket, a bike repair shop, a false-tooth business, artists' studios, a church, House Clearance). READ MORE All networks of communication have gone dark, and the land is awash with corpses. As they try to navigate what to do next – to look, however narrowly, into the future – it becomes clear that Sarah has a plan. She wants to 'save the world in a feminist way' by journeying to Dignes-les-Bains in France, a kind of Utopia where she will set up a midwifery school, with Audaz as her apprentice. And so the novel becomes an odyssey, our characters (minus Joy and Trevor), gathering supplies and heading, by bike, into the great unknown. This is dystopian fiction, but also utopian The odyssey is an accommodating form (just ask Joyce). You can wander off on as many tangents as you please. Dick uses it to great effect, meandering through everything from Cuban communism (Audaz grew up in Cuba, before moving to London), to semantics (Pressure Drop has a particular fascination with the meaning of words), to an anecdote about a secret truffle farmer and the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, to the joys of the kind of hangover where you don't get out of bed until after dark ('once you're out in this new beginning of a new darkness, your flayed nerve-endings are all quivering and the world feels raw and new and hilarious and strange and beautiful', Audaz observes, in the book's typically charged and opulent, yet colloquial, prose style). The book has no chapters, and relatively few line breaks, and at times this run-on nature can leave the reader bleary-eyed and slightly lost. But it makes sense that a book about a new world order should veer off course from the typical order of a novel, and attempt something new. With the treacherous journey these characters take, across sea and land, seeking asylum in places that turn out to trade in sex and violence, it's hard not to think of the plight of present-day migrants, many of whom are fleeing their own end-of-world scenarios (war, climate disaster, extreme poverty, persecution). But the events of this book are abstracted from political context. The point seems to be to place the reader into a close and blinkered viewpoint. We only understand what the characters understand about the world, which is very little. 'Fragmentation,' Audaz points out, 'is our natural state.' 'It is very recent in human history that we have any idea of overview – until stuff like newspapers and reading became really common, overview was just what the oldest person in your village remembered and what the farthest-travelled person discovered,' she muses, to the wonder – almost envy – of anyone who has grown up in an era of mass-communication. This close, childlike view – this innocence about the universe – also points to another of the book's main themes: that the end of the world is also the beginning of a new one. Devoid of an overarching understanding, the characters must construct their own; they must learn from one another, and from their experiences. The main exploration of this topic is through the beginning of all our worlds: birth. The book offers a deep and philosophical – but also carnal and physical – exploration of this sublime power mothers have, to deliver more life and to carry the past forwards into the future. Water in the Desert Fire in the Night is a curious and expansive text. I have called it an odyssey. It is also a love story. It is dystopian fiction, but also utopian. It is a philosophical study, full of pertinent, unanswerable questions. What does the world look like after the veil of civilisation has lifted? What continues to matter, and what does not? Are there some things that are so real, they continue after the end? Like love? Like life?
