This review is based on a screening at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Release details for The Life of Chuck are TBD.
Were the collected works of Stephen King a mighty hotel in the mountains, Mike Flanagan would be a shoo-in for the job of caretaker. Or has he always been the caretaker? Even before the writer-director started tackling the author’s canon, his projects seemed indebted to King, even possessed by him; just look at the time-jumping architecture of Oculus and the Netflix limited series The Haunting of Hill House. Since telling those rather Kingish tales of terror, Flanagan has made his fandom official, joining the likes of Rob Reiner, Frank Darabont, and Mick Garris in the exclusive club of filmmakers with multiple King movies on their resumes. What’s more, he’s adventurously risen to the challenge of taking on stories not so easily translated to the screen – with his adaptation of the supposedly unadaptable Gerald’s Game, with a Doctor Sleep that somehow functioned as a sequel to both versions of The Shining, and now with an extremely faithful take on a structurally ambitious King novella, The Life of Chuck.
There are no ghosts or ghoulies in the source material, a 100-some-page yarn pulled from the 2020 collection If It Bleeds. Instead, this is the author at his most metaphysically soggy – Uncle Steve the stoned philosopher, waxing on about galaxies on blades of grass, using a light supernatural conceit to extol the beauty of life’s befuddling mysteries. Flanagan preserves all the ruminative qualities of the story, as well as its eccentric shape: three acts, unfolding in reverse order, and beginning with the likely death of the known universe.
This opening vignette is the most… well, not exciting exactly (nothing so koan-like would ever stoop to getting our hearts pounding), but definitely the most surreally eventful of the three. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan play ex-spouses who reunite at the end of the world, which Flanagan depicts as more of a whimper than a bang: California splits into the ocean (as long promised), the internet goes down for good, and stars start disappearing from the sky – an unnerving sight, that. This is one of those borderline serene visions of the apocalypse where no one’s panicking and everyone’s just kind of morbidly curious, wandering the half-empty streets to marvel at the spectacle of it all coming apart. (As Matthew Lillard puts it, in a brief, affecting cameo, they’re all at the acceptance portion of their collective grief cycle.) It seems like a dream, which it probably would, and Flanagan shoots it like one, bathing these witnesses to the universe’s curtain call in a faintly celestial glow.
While the lights dim on humanity, our final representatives are greeted by a maddening ad campaign (or “final meme,” per Ejiofor’s perplexed school teacher): billboards and commercials, all celebrating “39 great years” for an accountant, Charles “Chuck” Krantz, played by Tom Hiddleston. Who is this Chuck and what’s he retiring from? They’ll never find out, but we do, as Flanagan moves on to a day-in-the-life detour from the eponymous life of Chuck – a spontaneous act of musical communion involving a jilted stranger and a drumming busker. Dance like no one’s watching, no one quite says, but it’s the implied lesson of this impromptu cornball performance, an instruction to live life to the fullest from a boomer author who can’t help but let his classic-rock worship seep into dialogue exchanges and epigraphs.
Act 3, the longest of the lot, finds King back in Hearts of Atlantis territory, rewinding to Chuck’s adolescence, with Hiddleston passing the title role to a trio of younger actors, Benjamin Pajak, Cody Flanagan, and Jacob Tremblay. Here, the boy works through some formative losses via a transformative love affair with dance and the advice of multiple mentor figures (including Mark Hamill as his sagely grandfather, hiding a secret in the attic that’s the closest The Life of Chuck comes to traditional King scariness). The author has always had a sentimental side, and that fully takes prominence in this miniature coming-of-age saga. Let’s just say that Tremblay gets off easier than he did in Flanagan’s last King adaptation, where a group of vampires used him like a vape pen.
Look, mileage will vary on whether The Life of Chuck achieves the profundity for which it transparently strains: If that old chestnut about life being about the journey not the destination still lands for you, expect to beam/weep as intended. The film’s failings lie less in message than delivery. Flanagan is so in love with his source material that he seems reluctant to part with any of it. He repurposes huge blocks of King’s prose as voice-over, read aloud by Nick Offerman and slathered over the film’s imagery so thickly that it begins to feel as though you’re watching a book on tape. The actors carry the emotional weight of this endless anecdote-sharing and lesson-dispensing (Flanagan has assembled an ensemble with gravitas, thankfully), along with a maudlin score that pleads with every tinkle of piano for your tears, your awe, your wonder.
The Life of Chuck is Stephen King at at his most metaphysically soggy, and Mike Flanagan preserves all its ruminative qualities.
So much of King’s work is cinematic right there on the page: To read his punchy, vivid prose is to have a picture – sometimes lovely, sometimes unspeakably grotesque – painted in your head. That, coupled with his book sales, is one reason so many have moved his words to the screen. But The Life of Chuck is more of a nesting doll of shopworn nuggets than a drama that demanded visualization. It’s abstractly impressive that Flanagan wrestled the story into movie form without streamlining its idiosyncrasies. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that its ideal form was literary, where the ideas could flow forward in one voice instead of hanging in the mouths of performers. This movie contains multitudes, and none of them will stop talking about Carl Sagan!
The truth is that the best King adaptations take some liberties. They find dark comedy where there was little, as in Brian De Palma’s virtuosic Carrie, or give his darkness a new shape, as in the all-time-downer of an ending Darabont invented for The Mist. And while we’ll gently sidle around the matter of whether Stanley Kubrick actually improved The Shining, even Flanagan knew to make some excisions to its divisive sequel. Here, he’s devoted himself chiefly to fidelity, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that someone less reverent would have really adapted The Life of Chuck instead of merely transcribing it. Then again, maybe any big-screen version of this particular heartwarmer was destined to play like Charlie Kaufman Presents Chicken Soup for the Soul.
