'The Life of Chuck' Review: Mike Flanagan Makes Stephen King’s Story Soar | TIFF 2024 (2024)

Many of the most beloved films of all time stem from the narratives birthed by the literary works of Stephen King. There are obvious contenders that are more explicitly horror films such as Carrie, Misery, or Dead Zone, or those that take his narratives and reshape them in certain ways like with Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. Yet it’s the slightly oddball, less overtly part of King’s overtly-genre themed canon that seems to translate with even greater success to the big screen. Stand By Me, Rob Reiner’s stunning adaptation of King’s novella “The Body,” continues to resonate decades later. Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption regularly appears on best-of lists to this day. And now, with Mike Flanagan’s stellar The Life of Chuck, we have another adaptation that immediately contends for being crowned the best King-originated film ever made.

Flanagan is, of course, no stranger to mining the works of this author, with 2017’s Gerald's Game, a psychological horror film, and 2019's Doctor Sleep finding a unique way of tying Kubrick’s version with the novel’s original precepts, creating a wild hybrid that was deserving of more praise than it received upon release. Flanagan is continuing to mine the scribe’s works as he’s set to captain an “oil tanker-sized” production based on the epic Dark Tower series, one of King’s most wild and epic creations that’s a merging of fantasy and Western motifs. At The Life of Chuck’s premiere, Flanagan discussed first reading King’s “If It Bleeds” collection of novellas soon after its April 2020 release, just as the COVID pandemic was resulting in global lockdown. For a storyline that uses prescience about future traumas as one of its central tenets, and questions our choices at the start of worldwide catastrophes, this was quite obviously the perfect story at the perfect time to reflect upon the need to take chances, to embrace the art in all things, and to hold dear those memories that make us who we are right up until the end.

What Is 'The Life of Chuck' About?

The Life of Chuck contains magnitudes, as Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” most famously articulated. King has crafted a philosophically rich, emotionally deep, intensely joyful narrative that in this adaptation feels like the culmination of Flanagan’s craft. Toying with our fears is a fundamental skill set for King and Flanagan alike, but it’s the deft touch in this project, where intertwined stories are knit together in ways both subtle and overt that, from its opening to closing frame, encourages us to find moments of joy in the face of existential dread.

Mirroring the novella’s structure, Chuck is told in reverse chronological order. Act Three (the first we see), subtitled "Thanks, Chuck;" introduces a teacher Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) where, mid-class, the student’s phones announce that all of California has slipped out into the sea. As global communication breaks down and a sense of aimlessness leads many to simply reject life in favor of suicide, we see as Marty clings to hope despite the world literally crumbling around him.

Reconnecting with his ex-girlfriend (Karen Gillan), they are haunted by an image on a billboard of a smiling, bespectacled man in an almost oppressively generic businessman suit, with “39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck" emblazoned below. The image begins to appear everywhere as things become all the more chaotic – from park benches, to glowing luminously from the windows of an oppressively normal suburban local. The mysterious figure appears both portentous and dull at the same time, this seemingly paradoxical divide is a touchstone to many of the film’s narrative shifts.

'The Life of Chuck' Dances Through Time

In the Second Act, “Buskers,” the narrator (performed with a perfect drawl by Nick Offerman) shares the story of an accountant (Tom Hiddleston) who gets swept up thanks to the beats of a street drummer played by Taylor Gordon, crafting an infectious, percussive performance that’s one for the ages. While not a huge narrative surprise when some joyous action finally takes hold (think Mads Mikkelsen in the Oscar-winning Another Round, or Christopher Walken rocking out to Fatboy Slim), the audience at the premiere was so taken by the performance that there was a mid-film ovation, clapping along with the on-screen crowd.

As the first-yet-final chapter unfolds (dubbed, fittingly, “I contain multitudes”), we’re introduced to a number of other people who help tell the story of a full life, from Mark Hamill and Mia Sara as grandparents, Samantha Sloyan as an instructor, to Jacob Tremblay, David Dastmalchian, Harvey Guillén, and, of course, Flannagan’s partner both on and offscreen since Occulus, Kate Siegel.

While much of the film’s charms lay in these various narrative machinations, there’s far more at play here than merely relying on a series of shifts. Rather than employing simple twists, the storytelling equivalent of a jump scare for cheap effect, in King’s storyline, and Flanagan’s adaptation, there’s a well-designed interplay that provides both thematic richness and moments of more sublime character moments. Credit to King’s original where it’s due, but in the end it’s the translation to the big screen, with all its physicality and warmth and rhythmic capabilities, that truly makes the source material soar. While on the written page Chuck’s story may work well enough, it’s when employing the unique capabilities of cinema, with elements from montage to performance to the magical act of merging sound with a moving image being the tools that are truly needed to maximize this story. It's where things truly become profound.

Flanagan Does It All With 'The Life of Chuck'

With Flanagan writing the adaptation, directing and co-producing, as well as editing the film, his fingerprints are all over the project, and so it’s at his feet that so much of the success of this film lies. His interdisciplinary role in the telling results in a remarkable consistency, leading viewers with an underlying tonal, performative and aesthetic coherence to help navigate something that feels at first a series of scattershot moments, but in the end encapsulates something gloriously personal.

As a famous Carl Sagan metaphor that serves as one of the film’s principal guiding tracks illustrates, in the grand scheme of cosmic time, our lives occupy a slice that is miniscule to the edge of meaninglessness, a blip-of-a-blip where our existence itself is, by almost any measure, trivial to the point of erasure. And yet, as the film so beautifully articulates, within that galactic, yawning void, there’s still love to be shared, art to be made, and lives to be lived to their fullest. The human capacity to have knowledge that it all inevitably ends is in conflict with our equally human capacity to revel in the ride we have along the way. Even as everything falls into the sea, and that which we hold dear is stripped away like dimming stars, at our best we can in these most dire, most truly horrific of situations, find ways of holding onto joy to the very end.

Flanagan’s latest is simply a stunner. His finest film is a deeply heartfelt, glorious thing. Dancing between the ruminative and the revelatory, it never succumbs to being maudlin or cloying. The Life of Chuck is a modern fable told with the deftness of a fairy tale, with the sheer exuberance of a musical while exuding the same sense of wonder one gets staring up at the heavens. A Life well-lived, indeed.

REVIEW

The Life of Chuck

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Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck is a stunner and one of the all-time great Stephen King adaptations.

Pros

• Writing, directing, editing, and more, Flanagan encapsulates something gloriously personal
• The film employs the tools of cinema to full effect, making King's writing leap off the page.
• In merging this story and the magic of cinema, Flanagan crafts something truly profound.

The Life of Chuck had its World Premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.