The Life of chuck

As horror has solidified itself as one of the last remaining bankable bastions of cinema, Stephen King’s vast trove of writing has become a juggernaut of intellectual property. The author is to the genre what Marvel is to action.

And few filmmakers understand the literary giant’s enduring appeal better than Mike Flanagan, who previously brought King’s Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep to the screen. (He also has a Carrie series in the works.)

The life of chuck:

But with The Life of Chuck, based on King’s novella of the same name from the 2020 collection If It Bleeds, Flanagan has a more expansive aim. This isn’t an act of adaptation so much as a bow in adoration.

His goal with this filmic translation is to tout King’s bona fides as the humanist behind Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Green Mile—that is, as more than just the purveyor of horror who wrote The Shining, Cujo, and It.

With this film, Flanagan puts the nuggets of wisdom that he’s gleaned from King’s novella on equal footing with Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, two texts excerpted extensively in the film to frame its ambitions.

But any genuine insight here about the value of an ordinary life within the vastness of the universe gets smothered in so much hokum.

The film’s backwards chronology traces the experience and impact of Charles “Chuck” Krantz (played at various ages by Benjamin Pajak, Jacob Tremblay, and Tom Hiddleston).

Flanagan introduces the character’s presence through a mysterious set of billboards thanking the smiling accountant for his 39 years of service. These cryptic, chipper advertisements feel like a cosmic joke directed at two former lovers, Felicia (Karen Gillan) and Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), as society teeters on the brink of collapse in the wake of environmental devastation.

The subsequent two acts provide some background on the man behind the billboards. The film’s middle section zooms in on a single moment featuring Hiddleston’s adult Chuck, an ordinary accountant ambling through a town square.

When he hears a busking drummer, he drops his briefcase and responds with a spontaneous dance that captivates all passersby.

Extended flashback:

An extended explanation in flashback follows, which details Chuck’s childhood living with Grandma Sarah (Mia Sara) and Grandpa Albie (Mark Hamill). Both pass on a love of dancing to him, but Albie later insists that his grandson decide on a more practical pursuit in mathematics.

Flanagan strings the audience along to the bitter end of The Life of Chuck with the insistence that an exciting and existential plot revelation lies underneath the film’s nicecore façade. But the film’s grand climactic reveal only exposes the emptiness that the filmmaker has glossed over, substituting the promise of profundity with the reality of its ultimate preposterousness.

Some of The Life of Chuck’s incompletion is baked into its design, as in Nick Offerman’s omniscient voiceover calling attention to the deliberate fractured nature of the narrative.

“Would answers make a good thing better?” he posits following Chuck’s big dance number. The film, to his point, doesn’t necessarily need more answers. However, some justification would certainly help The Life of Chuck escape the mires of unpersuasive pop psychology.

The narrator’s disingenuous supposition, more excuse than explanation, perfectly illustrates the gap between the film’s intention and execution.

It aspires to insightfulness but manages to do little other than recycle tired platitudes. The Life of Chuck seeks out the heavenly among its characters’ experiences, but Flanagan cannot see past what amounts to a hagiographic homage to King.

The film is a teary-eyed tribute to a titan that makes no effort to affirmatively prove that the author deserves mention in the same breath with the other name-checked giants.

Final thoughts:

This thought-terminating cliché disguised as a cinematic valentine ultimately undermines Flanagan’s own mission. The reverse chronology of the film, which insists that the true measure of a life can only be understood backwards, amounts to little more than kindergarten Kierkegaard.

The Life of Chuck strives to enshrine King as a bard of mystical forces in addition to malevolent ones. In the process, though, it ends up mistaking simplicity for sincerity—and only serves to reify King’s status as an easily exploitable brand.