“The world loves dancers but it needs accountants,” according to the grandfather in “The Life of Chuck” (StudioCanal), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse.
The wildly successful musical Billy Elliot stars a small boy whose talent as a dancer is off the wall. In the new movie, that small boy—Chuck—obeys grandpa, and trains as a suited-and-booted bean counter. But six months before he dies of a brain tumour at the age of thirty-nine, Chuck finds himself mesmerised by a lone drummer busking on a traffic-free street while on a business trip. He drops his briefcase and dazzles a rapidly forming crowd, leading them, Pied Piper like, to clap and sway in time with the beat. Then he goes one step further, inviting a just-dumped woman—“He did it the modern way!” (by text)—to join him. “When did you learn to dance like that?” he is asked, “You could dance for a living.” The scene reminds me of the joyful dancing in “In the Heights” (2021), an exceptional film by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton,” the musical. There is something truly beautiful about a group of people—whose only connection is being on the same chunk of pavement at the same time—momentarily losing their natural reticence and joining together to dance in the street. Back to Chuck: the scene is bathed in a gorgeous late-afternoon light, and is immediately followed by the man and the woman walking across a footbridge, sun behind their heads. When they meet the busker at an outside cafe (to split the money), the glorious background of the image is of fountains jetting water into a lake.
Some of the screenplay is delightful—“Star-crossed boyfriend from high school;” “Every single thing in every one of our history books happens in the last ten seconds;” “Drinking isn’t good for secrets;” “Dressed in the armour of accountancy;” “The cosmos burps out its last breath;” “The stars are just math; heck, you’re dancing, that’s just math too.” But the curious decision to use an off-camera narrator jars: “Glioblastoma continues its Blitzkrieg;” “I am wonderful and I have a right to be wonderful;” “The man did not fade, he was just insisting he had never been there in the first place.” And the clunky humour in the narration doesn’t sit comfortably with either the plot or the characters.
The well-drawn smaller parts consistently hit the target. When ten-year-old Chuck, petrified about dying, brings home-made muffins to a deliciously gossipy neighbour, the naughtiness of their conversation is charmingly played—“who’s smooching who?” A “sweet hippy-dippyish young woman who had no command of discipline” in her classroom wows Chuck by explaining a poem to him. And the P.E. teacher who teaches Chuck how to dance in the “Twirlers and Spinners” after-school club (“Three boys this year!”) uncannily reminds me of one secondary-school teacher who changed the direction of my own life.
As well as the street-dancing scene, I need to linger for a moment and describe one more. In the first act, always-watchable Chiwetel Ejiofor plays another wise teacher—and realises his utter powerlessness in the face of the rapidly-ending world. Late in the sequence, he walks with an elderly undertaker along an eerily empty road. The undertaker, played with exceptional poise by Carl Lumbly, also had a wish to be something different: “a weatherman, perhaps even for the [American television] networks.” There is one pregnant moment where the undertaker stops to rest on a bench, inviting the younger man to join him. A pause. But there isn’t time. The younger man needs to find his ex. The filmmakers measure this to-and-fro so delightfully that a real longing is created for the conversation between the men to continue. It is as well-paced, carefully constructed and satisfying a scene as anything I have seen this year.
“The Life of Chuck” is immersed in death. The first act is all about obliteration—not merely of our Earth but of the entire universe at the same moment. The emergent, macabre history of the old house; the worry in young Chuck’s endless questioning; the death of his parents and unborn sister in an accident; the early death of Chuck himself. Grandma tries to divert Chuck-the-worrier from being completely submerged by it all, “If your grandpa says he saw it before it happened, he is mistaken. He just drinks too much.” I hoped for a subplot about the rising incidence of cancer in younger people. But this isn’t the way the film goes. Instead, Chuck’s death is linked to the death of everyone else—the winking out of the stars as all the planets explode one by one.
I found myself hankering for the reversal of technological “progress” as the world is annihilated. First, “The internet’s still down. I don’t think it’s coming back this time;” then C.N.N. is efficiently replaced by a 1970s test card; then, finally, just the radio works. The dancing has stopped, permanently—so has the accountancy. How will the population react? “I think people will just wait,” one character thinks. “For what?” “For the end.”
Adam Poole
22nd August 2025
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
