It’s hard to know what to do with a film that begins with the end of the universe. The Life of Chuck places us in a generic urban/suburban world where normal things are starting to unravel. In a traffic snarl, a schoolteacher (Marty) sees a billboard with the picture of an accountant and the words, “Charles Krantz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!” We also see scenes of Marty in his classroom telling parents that their children are not doing well. The Internet no longer works; he has difficulty explaining that we should still be able to expect students to read and learn and do homework without computers. At home, Marty’s television broadcasts news of massive disasters across the U.S. Earthquakes have sent large parts of California into the sea; there are fires, and so on. The place of the traffic snarl is now a huge sinkhole. Countless cars have fallen into it and driving in the city has become impossible. People abandon their cars and trudge miles to get back home.

When his cellphone stops working, Marty walks for hours to the home of his ex-wife, Felicia. On the way, the power flickers, then goes out. Streets are dark. Yet, glowing on every glass window, like ghostly apparitions, are the words he first saw on the billboard: “Thanks, Chuck!” Meanwhile, we see a dying man surrounded by loved ones telling him he has done well despite suffering a brain tumor. He is 39 years old. He is Chuck.

Marty and Felicia, sitting in her backyard, can see scores of stars because all the city lights are extinguished. Then the stars themselves begin to disappear. They hold hands. One of them says “I love you” just as the universe ends.

That is the first act, although the film calls it Act 3. Along with the rest of the universe, Chuck has died. The film then takes us back in time, giving us his life story, first (Act 2) an important moment from nine months before his death, and then (Act 1) his life as an orphan reared by his grandparents. Chuck had a gift for dance and a certain talent for mathematics. He learns as a boy that Walt Whitman’s line, “I contain multitudes,” means that his own mind can contain the universe.

Thus the viewer is faced with various questions, none of which the film handles very deftly. Is there something particularly special about Chuck? Something beyond what we have seen of him thus far that could make the end of his own life mean the death of the universe? Do Chuck’s thoughts uniquely constitute the universe? Who is telling him “Thanks”? And what made his 39 years great? None of these questions is answered.

Despite all this, I liked the film. It contains (regardless of the intentions of its makers) a basic human truth worth pondering. That truth, in turn, raises a question about transcendence, one that has two answers. The film ignores the first, but it presents an excellent image of the second.

It is true that whenever a human being dies, something infinite dies. And what is lost could well be analogized to the universe as a whole. This is true even of rather ordinary lives. From Chuck’s perspective, his own death will be the end of everything. And this death is not only the loss of whatever was accomplished during his lifespan; it is also the loss of all his potential: the dancing he never seriously pursued; the people he could have helped in the future with his accounting skills; the additional children and grandchildren he might have had, and so forth. The branching possibilities inside any human being are unlimited and in that sense infinite.

All this is suggested by the film without any sense of the divine. There is a room—padlocked, off-limits to Chuck as a boy. In it his grandfather had had visions of death before it occurred. When Chuck finally entered the room, he had his own vision. The room is spooky, as befits a story originally written by Stephen King. But visions of death are thin gruel for hungry souls. Without divine transcendence, the extinction of life, the end of the universe—all this, in itself, is meaningless.

Indeed, even if death were eliminated and the universe were eternal, without something more than this life gives us, meaninglessness would remain. For the true value of a human life is found not in the multitudes we may be able to contain. You could understand—hold in your own mind—everything that it is possible to know about the universe and still lack anything to live for.

Meaning can come from two places. The first is from God who, at your death, is willing to take you to himself, if you wish to receive his love. The price of being embraced by your creator, who transcends you in every dimension, is the humility of being a creature. This perspective is absent from the film, as is customary for Hollywood.

By contrast, the second source of meaning, which is found in the love humans have for one another, is poignantly portrayed in the film. As the world falls apart, Marty wants to get back to Felicia. It is not a bad question for the viewer to ask: If the universe were coming to an end right now, where would I want to be? The transcendence of human love, in teaching, in caregiving, in the beauty of dance, in rearing children, in marriage, in friendship—this too is a wellspring of meaning, a mode of transcendence.

As the stars go out, is it too fanciful for me to say that the words “I love you” need to be said not only by the creatures one to another, but by the Creator himself?