RATING
Director(s): Mike Flanagan
Country: United States
Author: Mike Flanagan, Stephen King
Actor(s): Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay, Benjamin Pajak
Written by Tom Augustine
As much as Stephen King is a master of locating the perverse and terrifying in the everyday, he is also a brazen sentimentalist. It is very, very difficult to separate the man who wrote It, Carrie and The Stand from the man who wrote The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. King himself has publicly struggled, even disavowed the work of his, and that which has been adapted from him, that has strayed too far into pessimism — his infamous hatred of Kubrick’s masterful The Shining, for instance; or his rejection of his greatest, darkest book Pet Sematary, for its bleakness existential hopelessness. Like a yin-yang symbol, the drop of darkness in the light (and vice versa) is paradoxically what allows King to create lasting works of terror. His unsettling normie suburbanism, so straitlaced that even a raging coke addiction couldn’t undo it, is somehow the key to his ability to grip the populace. He is a different kind of storyteller than David Lynch, but it’s fair to pair the two in some senses — King is far more misty-eyed about his depiction of old-world Americana, to be fair, but both share certain influences (and love a lot of the same things, evidently). King is far more prolific (and, naturally, popular) than Lynch. Another corollary is perhaps Bruce Springsteen — an unabashedly sentimental writer, which allows the moments when he opens up the dark heart of the American soul (as in the masterpiece album Nebraska) to be all the more startling and raw. I’ve loved reading King since I truly discovered horror in my late teens — the prologue of IT so profoundly disturbed me, reading it in the park one golden hour of a summer afternoon, that I had to put it down and leave the rest unread for years. His popularity (and pop icon status) allow him to move in a rarified, perhaps unfortunate space — like Spielberg, he is a great artist, but one whose work is so widely accessible that it is often denied the moniker of Great Art. His ability to manipulate your sense of safety, even in reading a book, is unparalleled, yet his messy swings at sentimentality and a less than judicious capacity for the edit frequently pull him, as though drawn to a distant black hole, toward the ‘airport novel’ void.
For all my genuine love of King, I cannot hope to match the passion that Mike Flanagan brings to the author’s work. The Life of Chuck is his third adaptation of a King, following the gleefully nasty Gerald’s Game and my personal favourite Flanagan, Doctor Sleep. Even Flanagan’s non-King work, from TV series The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass to films like Hush, Oculus and Ouija: Origin of Evil, carry the author’s influence in spades. Flanagan’s dedication to King’s style is slavish, and periodically moving — Doctor Sleep pulled off a near-impossible feat, paying tribute to both King and the Kubrick adaptation of The Shining despite their seeming unwillingness to be reconnected. The result found a more vividly beating heart in the property than Kubrick seemed willing to show (at least partially down to a wonderful Ewen MacGregor performance), while still maintaining the inherent otherworldliness and slow-creeping dread of that great film. But, like King, Flanagan is a sentimentalist, and this can just as often be a thorn in his side as a feather in his cap: see Midnight Mass’ absurdly protracted monologuing on life, death, the universe and faith. The Life of Chuck allows this preeminent genre craftsman to take some surprising narrative swings (ones which you’d be forgiven for being blindsided by, so excessively do the trailers for the film focus on its heartstring-tugging properties at the expense of all else), but largely these are in service of that same saccharine urge, one of the least compelling modes that King himself can be found wading into from time to time.
This reverently cornball adaptation of the Stephen King short story is stranger and more complex than one might expect from its noncommittal, sappy trailer. Unfortunately, director Mike Flanagan, a strident King acolyte, never quite masters the delicate tonal mixture of earnestness and surreality this requires, a misstep for an emerging genre classicist of high quality.
Tom Hiddleston, who never quite sold audiences on his stardom even as he traded working with the likes of Jim Jarmusch, Joanna Hogg and Terence Davies for a a neverending jail sentence playing Loki in Marvel properties, is the ostensible star of Life of Chuck, though he is absent from long stretches of the film. Beginning, teasingly, with ‘Act Three’, before doubling back to reveal Act Two and One in reverse order, Chuck is initially a beguiling, mysterious presence in an eerie end of the world fable. The focus is instead on schoolteacher Marty (Chiwitel Ejiofor) and nurse Felicia (Karen Gillan), who seemingly have no relation to Chuck beyond seeing his face plastered on billboards, screens and bus stops in their small town. The ads, which simply state ‘39 great years! Thanks Chuck!’ arrive with no explanation, even as a panoply of natural and man-made disasters begin to escalate society toward armageddon. This is the strongest segment of the film — and to reveal too much about its intentions would be to spoil the surprise — in which Flanagan scratches at the strange, drifting miasma of living on an earth with simply too much information, all of it bad, and the gently nagging notion that it’s all coming to an end sooner rather than later. Most compelling, the director begins to weave personal apocalypses with global ones, crafting a thematic microcosm of that Whitman phrase uttered several times throughout the film’s runtime: ‘I contain multitudes’. Through it all, Ejiofor and Gillan are strong emotional anchors, their slowly escalating grief over words unsaid and love just starting to rekindle at precisely the wrong time incredibly affecting. This Act also introduces a wonderful feature of Life of Chuck — a veritable army of character actors, stealing scenes left and right. A one-and-done scene by Matthew Lillard early on here threatens to walk away with the movie itself.
In later Acts, we begin to delve more deeply into the mysterious Chuck, and why his life in particular is the focus of this story. Hiddleston briefly takes centre-stage — particularly in a lively dance sequence that functions as a major setpiece in the film’s otherwise maudlin storytelling — before ceding again to younger Chucks played to varying degrees of success by Jacob Tremblay, Benjamin Pajak and (son of Mike) Cody Flanagan. Familiar faces dot the landscape — Mark Hamill! Mia Sara! Nick Offerman! The New World’s Q’Orianka Kilcher! — eventually assembling a giant, nakedly sentimental ode to the mystery of the world that fills us and surrounds us in all its beauty and pain. I think if you’ve read reviews of mine you can identify that I am no cynic. I love cheesiness. Hold the irony. The Life of Chuck, with its cinematic and narrative verve deployed to such mystically optimistic ends, should have at least struck a chord with the unapologetic, ABBA-loving sentimentalist within me, right? So why did The Life of Chuck leave me so unfulfilled? By the time the credits rolled, I felt the air go out of me a little. That’s it? For all its eager monologuing on the unknowability of it all, The Life of Chuck remains trapped by its own schematics — the more it reveals itself, and overexerts in explaining, the less of an emotional experience it becomes. Its many characters in the later segments feel like nodules entered into some massive motherboard: gone is the radiant humanism of Act One’s many random faces. Filmically and narratively, it forces itself into corridors of ordinariness that leave one frustrated by the more radical avenues left unexplored. This ties back into King — accepting some element of his gluggy Americana is a given, but rarely has his rose-tinted remembrances of an America that never really was felt more cloying or past-their-prime than here. As with late-era King’s writing, one can’t help but wish The Life of Chuck spent less time looking back, and more time forging forward.
The Life of Chuck is in cinemas now.