The Life of Chuck: a soft-edged, big-hearted Stephen King adaptation
Director Mike Flanagan has proved himself to be King’s most sympathetic interpreter on film with The Life of Chuck, the story of a man’s life in three acts, told backwards.
Mike Flanagan’s film presents a very faithful adaptation of Stephen King’s 2020 novella; a story told in three parts moving backwards from the death of uptight accountant Chuck at 39 years old to his childhood supernatural encounter with his own destiny. Flanagan describes himself as one of King’s ‘Constant Readers’ (as uber-fans call themselves), and he has already adapted King’s novels Gerald’s Game (2017) and Doctor Sleep (2019). He is currently working on the mammoth task of adapting King’s Dark Tower books. The director seems uncannily in sympathy with King: there is horror, of course, but also a soft-edged, big-hearted hope for some kind of redemption, however qualified. This is sometimes thought of as sentimental, but this iteration of King’s abiding narrative arc still has some teeth. Flanagan too is interested in the fragile resilience that comes in the wake of traumas that can never be wished away.
The Life of Chuck is closer to King’s gentle 1982 novella The Body (filmed as Stand by Me, 1986) than the apocalyptic horror of The Stand (1978). It has a wistful, homiletic voiceover by Nick Offerman, delivering King’s prose largely unedited. This is not a horror film, although it starts with the end of the world. It is more a redemptive fantasy, straining to find rueful acceptance of life’s losses in the language of the cosmic sublime. It is not ashamed of displaying grand emotions and wants the viewer to give into these too.
In the first of three parts, we seem to be in standard apocalypse-onset mode, small town America plunging into system failure. The section is anchored by Chiwetel Ejiofor as a divorcé navigating the collapse, including a long phone call with his ex-wife that introduces the cosmic frame early on. Within this crisis of failing electrical networks and sinkholes clogging the local traffic, there are increasing numbers of TV ads, billboards and posters that inexplicably read ‘39 Great Years! Thanks Chuck!’ next to a gormless smiling image of a local accountant (played by Tom Hiddleston). The enigmatic juxtaposition of this bland farewell party message and the end of the universe – even the stars in the night sky start blinking out – holds promise.
The success of the film hinges on its second act, where we focus on Chuck a few months before, taking time out from a boring accountancy conference to pause awhile to listen to a busker drumming in the street. Chuck loosens up, lets himself go, and starts to dance. This sustained routine lasts for about ten minutes and is clearly reaching for meme status. Hiddleston acquits himself way better in dance than equivalent routines by major stars in, say, La La Land (2016). It is more repressed than the wild abandon of Mads Mikkelsen at the end of Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (2020), which seems to fit this cautious accountant. The sequence is meant to work as a joyous moment of carpe diem, a cancellation of the apocalypse we have just left behind.
But then we are faced with Chuck’s childhood, one pierced with traumatic losses – not just his parents, but his grandparents too. Mark Hamill, as his grandfather, fits right into that familiar gruff and folksy surrogate father figure that is everywhere in King’s stories, but it is the grandmother (played by Mia Sara) who teaches Chuck how to dance. It has the rosy glow of small-town Norman Rockwell Americana, and Chuck’s tribulations at the school dance are hardly original – but that is the whole point. Every human “contains multitudes”, as the familiar Walt Whitman quote has it: every man’s end is the death of a complete world. The final scenes reveal the weird supernatural element in the family attic that anticipates how the world will end – Chuck’s world, anyway. It’s all suggestive and under-explained, which may frustrate some, but by this time Flanagan is seeking to push the emotional crescendo that will unite the film’s three sections.
This is Flanagan’s first independent film since his crowdfunded debut Absentia (2011). His run of Netflix series has had some very prolix scripts (the 2021 series Midnight Mass contained lots of speechifying). This film reins that impulse in while staying close to the narrative voice of King’s novella. It has its own pleasing eccentricities (a recurring role for Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, 1980–81, for instance, as a reference point for the popular scientific sublime). The Life of Chuck suggests that Flanagan has become King’s most sympathetic interpreter on film, in tune with the King’s late narratives of bittersweet attempts to grab momentary joy from life’s inevitably wounded passage.
► The Life of Chuck is in UK cinemas now.