Josh Reviews The Life of Chuck

When I was in high school, I read a Stephen King story in an English class.  I knew who Stephen King was, of course, but I hadn’t read any of his novels.  He was very much a horror author in my mind, and that didn’t interest me back then.  But then I read this short story.  I wish I could remember what it was!  I don’t remember anything about the story except that I loved it, and I don’t believe it had any horror or supernatural elements at all.  Huh, I thought.  This Stephen King guy is a pretty good writer!  A year or so later (in 1994), The Shawshank Redemption movie was released.  I was paying attention to movies then, so I knew about Shawshank, mostly because Tim Robbins was in it, and I knew I liked him in Bull Durham and I.Q.  But (like most people; the film was not a hit theatrically) I didn’t wind up seeing Shawshank in theatres.  I didn’t see it until I rented in on VHS a year or two later, when I was in college.  By that point I’d seen Dead Man Walking and The Hudsucker Proxy (which I adored), and I think that led me to watch Shawshank because I wanted to see another Tim Robbins performance.  I was, of course, captivated by Frank Darabont’s film, which is adapted from a novella by Stephen King.  Shawshank cemented me as a Stephen King fan, even though I don’t think I’d read any of his books at that point!

That’s long since changed, of course.  I love Stephen King’s writing — from his super-long novels to his novellas to his short stories.  The Life of Chuck is adapted from the novella of the same title in Mr. King’s 2020 collection of four novellas, If it Bleeds.  I only recently read that collection, because I wanted to read the original story before seeing this film.  I knew I needed to see the film, because it was written and directed by Mike Flanagan, who wrote and directed the enormously underrated 2019 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining.  (The way Mr. Flanagan brilliantly merged the iconography and continuity of both Mr. King’s original novel and Stanley Kubrick’s film, allowing the Doctor Sleep movie to be a sequel to them both, was incredible.) Mr. Flanagan seems to have inherited from Frank Darabont the title of best movie-maker caretaker of Stephen King’s work.  (Mr. Darabont directed Shawshank, of course; and also The Green Mile and The Mist.  I love all three films.)

I enjoyed Mr. King’s novella The Life of Chuck, though I found its structure (of three “acts” only tangentially connected) somewhat perplexing.  I was curious to see how this could be adapted as a film.  I’d assumed that the movie version would blend aspects from those three tales in the novella into one more unified story.  I was surprised and impressed by how faithfully Mike Flanagan and his team have adapted Mr. King’s story for the screen.  Mr. Flanagan stuck closely to the novella’s structure, and dang it if he didn’t find a way to make that work beautifully as a movie.

I’m going to avoid summarizing the movie’s plot, because I don’t want to spoil the joy of figuring out how the very different pieces of this story fit together.  I’ll say that the movie opens in a world that feels only a hair’s breadth from our own.  Weather calamities are wreaking havoc across the globe, and the infrastructure we depend on (both the stability of roads and bridges and the functioning of the internet and TV) is crumbling.  We meet an English teacher named Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and a nurse named Felicia (Karen Gillan).  Marty and Felicia are divorced, but they reconnect during these scary end-of-days-feeling times.  How do their stories connect to that of Chuck Krantz, the accountant about whom signs and advertisements seem to be appearing everywhere they look, wishing him “Thanks for 39 Great Years!”?

The movie will answer this question, though it won’t connect every single dot for you.  The movie provides all the answers one needs, while also allowing plenty of space for viewers to think and talk about what they’ve seen.  I like that balance.

There’s one small supernatural element that comes late in the film, but for the most part, this story eschews the horror and fantastical elements that most people so strongly connect to the name Stephen King.  The film (and the original novella) are setting out to tell a humanistic story, one with some big things to say about human beings and our lives.  The movie’s puzzle-box structure is designed to keep an audience engaged and asking questions, and it’s fun to see how things fit together in the end.  But the movie’s strength lies in its emotional power.  This is a sweet, sentimental movie, and I found it quite moving in places.  The movie really sings when it captures moments of joy (while at the same time having its eyes open to the reality of the pain, struggle, and death so present in daily existence).  The mid-movie dance sequence between Chuck and a young woman, Janice (Annalise Basso) he meets on the street is tremendous fun, as is the later flashback sequence that explains just where Chuck learned his top-shelf dance moves.  It’s a pleasure to see such pleasure captured on-screen!

The film is impeccably cast.  Tom Hiddleston (Loki in the MCU) is delightful as the titular Chuck.  Because all of the movie’s marketing, posters, etc. were centered on Mr. Hiddleston as Chuck — and Chuck’s name is in the title — I’d expected the movie to find ways to spend more time with Chuck than we do in the novella; but again, surprisingly, Mr. Flanagan hewed very closely to the structure of Mr. King’s story, which means Mr. Hiddleston doesn’t have nearly as much screen time as I’d expected him to!  But that’s OK, he’s wonderful in all of his scenes.  He brings a soulfulness to Chuck that is important, and a seriousness balanced with his whimsy.

Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity, 12 Years a Slave, The Martian, Doctor Strange) and Karen Gillan (Nebula in the Guardians of the Galaxy films) have a wonderful chemistry together.  They both do a good job in playing the horror of their situation — trying to maintain normalcy in a rapidy-collapsing world — with just the right level of terror balanced with acceptance.  It’s a true pleasure to see Mia Sara back on screen again, though I suffered no small amount of existential terror at the reality that the vivacious teenager in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is now playing a grandmother.  Ms. Sara is wonderful as young Chuck’s “bubbe” (yiddish for grandmother); her eyes and her smile remain captivating on screen.  Ms. Sara perfectly nails theformative role this woman played in young Chuck’s life.  The great Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker himself!) gets to indulge in some character-actor fun, putting on a hunch and a Jewish grandpa accent to play Chuck’s “zayde” (grandfather).  Mr. Hamill has always been a better actor than he’s given credit for; for the past few decades he’s been able to really cut loose in animation as a voice artist; it’s great to get to see him given a meaty role in live-action.  All the kids who play young Chuck at various ages are great.  Jacob Tremblay (Room, The Predator, and he has one amazing scene in Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep film) is solid as the teenaged Chuck, but it’s Benjamin Pajak who really shines as 11-year-old Chuck.  Mr. Pajak is amazing in those dancing scenes!!  So too is Trinity Bliss as Cat McCoy, young Chuck’s 8th grade dance partner.

Annalise Basso is funny and sweet as Janice, the recently-dumped young woman who winds up dancing with Chuck, and Taylor Gordon is perfect as the drumming busker whose music pulls the two of them in.  Carl Lumbly (Alias, Captain America: Brave New World) is wonderful as Sam Yarborough, a funeral home director and wannabe weatherman.  (Mr. Lumbly’s incredible voice is pure music to my ears.)  Kate Siegel and Samantha Sloyan are both terrific as two teachers with a strong influence on young Chuck.  Matthew Lillard (Scream, Scooby-Doo) kills in one critical scene as a neighbor of Marty’s.  I wasn’t sure about the movie’s use of voice-over (that’s not usually a good idea in a movie), but when the prose is as beautiful as that of Stephen King’s, and when the voice is as compelling as that of Nick Offerman’s, how can I be unhappy?

I’m thrilled to have seen The Life of Chuck.  This is a strange movie, and some might be put-off by its unusual narrative structure.  But I found it a pleasure from start to finish.