Primarily known for his horror television shows like “The Haunting of Hill House,” Mike Flanagan is no stranger to literary adaptation.
He’s also no stranger to Stephen King, having adapted both “Gerald’s Game” and “Doctor Sleep” in the past ten years. “The Life of Chuck,” the newest of Flanagan’s King adaptations, is a bit sweeter and more optimistic than their previous collaborations. And yet, it feels more like an extension of Flanagan’s past work than a swerve.
There’s always been an earnest quality to Flanagan’s work, one that comes through most strongly in the best moments of shows like “The Haunting of Bly Manor” and “Midnight Mass.” For as chilling as the horror can be, the emotional, thematic questions those shows explore is what truly sets them apart – and “The Life of Chuck” is interested in exploring one of the more heady of those questions: what makes life meaningful?
As sweet and buoyant as “The Life of Chuck” is, it does not pretend that meaning only comes from joy. “Life affirming” is the phrase that keeps popping up around this film, and it is – but finding meaning in our lives is far more complicated than simply finding happiness.
Much like the novella, “The Life of Chuck” unfolds over three acts presented in reverse chronological order, the first (Act III) centering around a schoolteacher named Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who is experiencing an apocalyptic series of events. The internet is gone, California just sunk into the ocean, and ads keep popping up around town congratulating someone named Chuck Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) on his retirement. The next two acts center on different aspects of Chuck’s life – one on a singular day, and the other on the formative years of Chuck’s life, which he spent living with his grandparents.
There’s a way to read “The Life of Chuck” as an overload of optimism. Earnestness, especially in this day and age, is a tricky thing to stomach for most people, and a trickier thing still for a filmmaker to really get right. Your mileage may vary, but what works so well about “The Life of Chuck” is that it understands that optimism doesn’t come without darkness. One of the reasons Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” works so well is because it never compromises on the direness of the position Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart) finds himself in. For hope to really feel hopeful, there’s got to be realism involved.
Flanagan understands this. The first act of “The Life of Chuck” is the strangest, the funniest, and the bleakest of the bunch. It doesn’t deal directly with Chuck himself, but rather a seemingly ancillary group of people living through the end of the world, leaving the audience trying to figure out what type of movie they’re watching, and not really understanding what that is until the second act begins.
The way that the characters handle the apocalypse feels very true to life. Some people are still going through the motions, and the fact that Pornhub doesn’t exist anymore seems to upset everyone more than a piece of a state falling off into the sea. Beyond grainy news footage, we never actually experience any of the environmental disasters taking place because Marty never does – Marty wakes up to a still picturesque and pristine neighborhood. One morning, he walks outside to go to work and his neighbor Gus (Matthew Lillard), upbeat as can be, informs him that a giant sinkhole has opened in the middle of the road, jamming up traffic and trapping everybody in the neighborhood.
Gus goes on to reminisce about the early days of the end of the world, when people were still fighting, still protesting, still angry. Now, everyone seems to have just accepted their fate. This monologue is accompanied by shots of blank-stared people dressed for work slowly walking home, abandoning their cars to the sink hole. Everyone has given up.
In the middle of this banal trudge to the finish, ads thanking Chuck Krantz continuously pop up, but no one seems to know who he is. The other acts begin, and the movie starts to explore the question that has plagued this group of characters thus far: what is it about Chuck that warrants this type of remembrance?
The short answer is, nothing, really. Or maybe the mere fact of human existence is enough to allow for reverence. Chuck is an average guy – a guy who loves the old Gene Kelly movies he used to watch growing up with his grandmother (Mia Sara, in her first movie role in over a decade), who dreamed of being a dancer himself until logic convinced him an accountant would be a more fruitful occupation. He has not lived a monumental life in the way we tend to assign value to that word, but he has experienced moments that feel momentous.
The film’s second act is also perhaps its most joyous, a full-on musical break where Chuck and a young woman suffering from a breakup (Annalise Basso) spontaneously begin to dance to the beat of a busker playing the drums. This moment reminds Chuck what it’s like to feel alive, but being alive is pain as well as joy. After the dance is over, the melancholy that washes over Chuck is palpable. When the busker asks him why he stopped, he can’t articulate the reason, can’t say why a dream he gave up on so long ago suddenly reappeared to him at that very moment.
In “The Life of Chuck,” there’s a constant push and pull between life’s banality and the few moments of elation that come in between. What Flanagan is able to show so well is that the banal is not always unimportant, and pain, sadness, and fear are just as important to who we are as love, joy, or courage.
Towards the end of the film, Chuck’s teacher, Miss Richards (Kate Siegel) delivers a very Flanagan-esque monologue that contains the film’s thesis statement, explaining the phrase “I contain multitudes” from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” She holds young Chuck’s (Benjamin Pajak) head in her hands and tells him that everything he sees, everything he learns, makes up an entire universe in his head. At the end of her speech, she asks Chuck if he understands. He nods, but instead of a look of wonder, he has a look of fear on his face.
A lesser movie might have rested on the cosmic hope of Miss Richards’ statement, but here, fear is as important to Chuck’s understanding of his own role in the world as anything else. The moment is earnest, yes – but not uncomplicated.