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A lesser Stephen King adaptation by Mike Flanagan

Posted on by Vaseline
A lesser Stephen King adaptation by Mike Flanagan

This review is based on a screening at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Release details for The Life of Chuck are pending.

If the collected works of Stephen King were a mighty mountain hotel, Mike Flanagan would be a shoo-in for the job of concierge. Or does he always been the administrator? Even before the writer-director began tackling the auteur’s canon, his projects seemed indebted to King, even in his ownership; just look at the time-hopping architecture of Eye and the Netflix limited series The Ghosts of Hill House. Since telling those rather kingly 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 films under their belts. What’s more, he’s taken on the challenge of tackling stories that don’t translate so easily to the screen in adventurous ways – with his adaptation of the supposedly unadaptable Gerald’s gameimmediately Doctor Sleep which somehow functioned as a sequel to both versions of The Appearanceand now with an extremely faithful interpretation of a structurally ambitious King novella, The Life of Chuck.

There are no ghosts or ghouls in the source material, a 100-odd page story from the 2020 collection If It Bleeds . Instead, this is the author at his most metaphysically soaked – Uncle Steve, the stoned philosopher, riffing on galaxies on blades of grass and using a touch of supernatural fiction to extol the beauty of life’s baffling mysteries. Flanagan retains all the story’s pensive qualities, as well as its eccentric form: three acts, unfolding in reverse order, beginning with the probable death of the known universe.

This opening scene is the most… well, not exciting exactly (nothing so koanic could ever stoop so low as to set our hearts racing), but certainly the most surreally eventful of the three. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan play ex-spouses reunited 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 almost serene visions of the apocalypse in which no one panics and everyone is just a little morbidly curious, wandering the half-empty streets to gawk at the spectacle of the disintegration. (As Matthew Lillard puts it in a brief, poignant cameo, they’re all in the acceptance phase of their collective grief cycle.) It seems like a dream, which it probably is, and Flanagan films it as if it were a dream, bathing these witnesses to the end of the universe in a dim, celestial light.

As the lights dim on humanity, our last representatives are greeted by a frenzied advertising campaign (or “last meme,” according to Ejiofor’s bewildered schoolmaster): 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 going to retire from? They’ll never know, but we do, as Flanagan proceeds with a day-in-the-life detour of Chuck’s eponymous life—a spontaneous act of musical communion with a forsaken stranger and a drumming street musician. Dance like no one is watchingno one says exactly, but it’s the implicit lesson of this improvised performance, an instruction on living life to the fullest from a boomer auteur who can’t let his adoration of classic rock seep into dialogue and mottos.

Act 3, the longest of the bunch, finds King back in Hearts of Atlantis territory, rewinding to Chuck’s adolescence, with Hiddleston handing off 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 wise grandfather, who harbors a secret in the attic that comes closest to traditional King creepiness that The Life of Chuck offers). The auteur has always had a sentimental side, and it’s on full display in this miniature coming-of-age saga. Let’s just say Tremblay gets off easier than he did in Flanagan’s last King adaptation, where a group of vampires used him as a vape pen.

Look, The Life of Chuck will vary in whether it achieves the profundity it transparently aspires to: if that old chestnut about life being about the journey and not the destination still lands with you, expect to beam/cry as intended. The film’s shortcomings lie less in its message than in its execution. Flanagan is so in love with his source material that he’s loath to part with it. He recycles huge blocks of King’s prose as voiceover, read by Nick Offerman and slathered so thickly over the film’s images that it starts to feel like you’re watching a book on tape. The actors carry the emotional weight of this endless sharing of anecdotes and imparting of lessons (Flanagan has thankfully assembled an ensemble with earnestness), along with a sentimental score that begs for your tears, your awe, your wonder with every tinkle of the piano.

The Life of Chuck is Stephen King’s most metaphysically drastic book, and Mike Flanagan retains all of his pensive qualities.

So much of King’s work is cinematic on the page: When you read his powerful, vivid prose, you have a picture—sometimes beautiful, sometimes unspeakably grotesque—painted in your mind. That, combined with his book sales, is one reason so many people have transferred his words to the screen. But The Life of Chuck is more a nesting doll of worn-out bits than a drama that required visualization. It’s abstractly impressive that Flanagan has wrestled the story into film form without streamlining its idiosyncrasies. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that the ideal form was literary, where ideas could flow in a unified voice rather than hanging in the mouths of the performers. There are many of them in this film, and none of them will stop talking about Carl Sagan!

The truth is, the best King adaptations take some liberties. They find black comedy where there was little, as in Brian De Palma’s virtuoso Carrieror give his darkness a new shape, as in the eternal damper of an ending that Darabont has devised for himself The Mist. And while we’re carefully skirting the issue of whether Stanley Kubrick actually improved on The Shining, even Flanagan managed to make a few omissions in the divisive sequel. Here he’s mostly devoted to fidelity, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that someone less reverent really amended The Life of Chuck instead of just transcribing it. Then again, maybe any big-screen version of this heartwarmer was destined to play like Charlie Kaufman Presents Chicken Soup for the Soul.

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