Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Mike Flanagan
Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Mark Hamill, Jacob Tremblay, Matthew Lillard, Mia Sara, Nick Offerman
Some of the best Stephen King screen adaptations have come from his non-horror output, but even the best of those - Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption - suffer from schmaltzy voiceovers that insist on telling the audience how they should be feeling. Mike Flanagan, who has become the modern Mick Garris in dedicating his career to adapting King for both cinema and TV, is once again guilty of this crime with his take on King's non-horror novella The Life of Chuck. There's some good technical filmmaking on display here, but Flanagan shows contempt for our ability to follow along with his images by adding a didactic voiceover (courtesy of Nick Offerman) that turns a mediocre movie into a bad one.
King's non-horror work tends to lean into sentimentality, and that's what we get with this movie and its "dance like nobody's watching" Hallmark card message. The Chuck of the title is a rather unremarkable man, an accountant no less, but the movie makes the case that even the most mundane of men contain multitudes. The problem is Chuck doesn't really have any such layers. We learn that he likes to dance, but practically nothing else about this random man. Hitchcock famously said that cinema is life with the dull bits taken out. It's also life with the dull people taken out, but apparently nobody told that to Flanagan.
The people here are dull on the page, but a fantastic cast manages to make them superficially interesting. Chiwetel Ejiofor might be the most under-appreciated actor working today, constantly straddled with roles that are beneath his abilities, and that's what he gets here. The film is split into three reverse chronological acts, each weaker than the last. In the first, or the last, we find Ejiofor playing Marty, a high school teacher who remains dedicated to his job despite the world literally falling apart around him. It seems we're in the end times, with California having slid into the ocean, just as Warren Zevon's "mystics and statistics" said it would, and sinkholes appearing on Main Street. Amid all this chaos, Marty reconnects with his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan, also excellent), a nurse who is similarly dedicated to continuing her job to the end. He also becomes obsessed with the many billboards and radio and TV adverts thanking a mysterious Chuck Krantz for "39 years of service."
This first section suffers from Offerman's voiceover insisting on replacing ambiguous fantasy with deadening literalism, along with a lazy speech from Marty's neighbour (Matthew Lillard, who has surprisingly become a fine character actor in recent years) that details how we got to this point. But Ejiofor, Gillan, Lillard and veteran actor Carl Lumbly as a wistful undertaker are all so good that we get drawn into this surreal depiction of humanity's reaction to the end times. Far from the usual cynical vision of the apocalypse, King and Flanagan display a welcome optimism, positing that when the planet finally says our time is up we'll seek to reconcile rather than riot. In making the three central figures a teacher, nurse and undertaker, it's hard not to think of those who kept the world running during the pandemic.
The Life of Chuck begins to fall flat once it swaps the magic realism of its opening section for the mundanity of Chuck's life. It does however feature what might be western cinema's best dance sequence of the 21st century. We finally meet chuck Krantz as played by Tom Hiddleston, a 39-year-old accountant who finds himself entranced by a drumming busker (Taylor Gordon) and launches into an impromptu dance in the middle of a street, sweeping a recently dumped young woman (Annalise Basso) off her feet in the process. Flanagan's film is peppered with nods to classic Hollywood musicals, and his skill in pulling off this sequence shows he's studied the old masters. Hiddleston is impressively fleet of foot, and Flanagan's camera movement and cuts are in perfect sync with Chuck's emotional exhilaration. As great scenes in otherwise bad movies go, this is one for the ages.
For the final act we're taken back to Chuck's childhood, where we find him living with his grandparents (an angelic Mia Sara and a hammy Mark Hamill) in the wake of his parents' deaths. This is were Chuck (played as a kid by Benjamin Pajak, who looks like a mini-Spielberg) begins his lifelong love affair with dance, as his granny introduces him to Hollywood musicals (there's a nice gag that sees her rushing to cover his eyes during a VHS screening of All That Jazz) and he joins his school's dance club. The schmaltz is dialled up to 11, but a miscast Hamill struggles to sell the necessary pathos, his monologue about the romance of mathematics falling especially flat. What's most disappointing is that this section's big dance number, in which Chuck moonwalks with a girl he has a crush on, pales in comparison to the earlier toe-tapping from Hiddleston. It all leads to a revelation that will have most viewers mouthing "Is that it?"
To be fair to Flanagan and King, that's kind of their point. The Life of Chuck wants to encourage us to live our lives to the full so we don't find ourselves asking "Is that it?" when our own end credits start rolling before our eyes. But it does so in the most uninspiring way, and no matter how many times Offerman implores us to cry, we're rarely moved, merely manipulated.
The Life of Chuck is in UK/ROI cinemas from August 20th.
