The best movie that most people are missing this summer: Mike Flanagan and Stephen King’s THE LIFE OF CHUCK (2024)

 

All Images Courtesy: Neon

The biggest tragedy and missed opportunity of this summer movie season has got to be the bizarrely fast theatrical death of The Life of Chuck. Mike Flanagan’s magical-realist drama, based on one of Stephen King’s non-horror novellas, received glowing praise and a ton of buzz on the festival circuit, and has gotten equally great critical and audience scores; the vast majority of the people who have seen The Life of Chuck absolutely love it. The problem is, very few people are going to see it, and the ability to go see it at all is extremely limited. After a weak opening weekend during the busiest moviegoing season of the year, theaters have dropped most of Chuck’s showtimes in only the film’s second week, meaning that it literally has not been given a chance to build up any word-of-mouth energy at all. And I think this is definitely a film that would build up word-of-mouth energy. It is a tough film to market, and its hopeful, humanistic, magical-realist style will be one that audiences may be wary of: they want to hear from people they know and trust that this is the good, genuine version of a story like that (Big Fish, Pleasantville, The Truman Show, Hugo, etc) and not the bad, emotionally manipulative, schmaltzy version of a story like that (looking at you, Forrest Gump). The Life of Chuck is definitely the good version: emotionally sincere, thoughtful, and honestly exploring rich human themes, not giving pat, comfortable answers. But skeptical audiences need time to hear that via word-of-mouth, and theaters haven’t given the movie any time to find its audience. And it deserves to have its audience find it. This film is something really special, and it understands the magic of Stephen King’s writing in a way that few films do.

 

Let’s unpack that for a moment – the magic of Stephen King’s writing. Because it’s something that most straightforward horror adaptations of his stories miss altogether. Mike Flanagan understands why Stephen King is an incredible writer in a way that only a very short list of other filmmakers (principally Rob Reiner and Frank Darabont) ever have - it's because no matter what genre he's writing in, Stephen King writes characters with tremendous depth and insight, and with a prose that can capture the human condition so beautifully. He is more than a horror writer who is here to frighten us, he's a drama writer whose stories also are usually horror stories. The Shining is a drama about how addiction tears apart a family and turns a husband and father into a monster despite his desire to hold it together because he loves his wife and son; it is also a horror story about a severely haunted old hotel. It is a wistfully nostalgic coming-of-age drama and a bittersweet story about looking back on youth from middle age; it’s also a truly frightening cosmic horror saga. The horror is the hook, and the elevator pitch that brings you in; the thoughtfully-observed human drama written with all the care of any other great literature is why these novels are enduring classics that are still loved and talked about and adapted over and over. This is what people who only know Stephen King from his film adaptations and have never actually read one of his better novels tend to not fully appreciate; his books are so much better and so much richer than you think they are if you only know him from the films. Here, adapting that rare thing, a non-horror Stephen King drama, Mike Flanagan captures the essence of King's lyrical prose and thoughtful insights into humanity in a way that few films have. Certainly there have been others that have captured this – Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption, Doctor Sleep – but it’s a pretty short list, and The Life of Chuck definitely belongs on it.

 

The Life of Chuck is a strange, unexpectedly-structured, very introspective magical-realist musing on life, mortality, human connection, and how memory collects our lives into a narrative universe that we carry in our heads. It's about heavy ideas but it isn't sad or emotionally manipulative; it is warm and hopeful and life-affirming but it isn’t saccharin or cheesy or offering platitudes or easy answers, it's just... got a lot of thoughts about it all. And it isn't trying to make some grandiose statement about the human condition on the whole, and it isn't trying to be the great American movie that defines a generation (if it sounds like I’m trying to outline the ways in which it definitely is not like Forrest Gump… that’s because I am), it's just a thoughtfully observed movie about this one guy, and his life and death and memories. It's just… the life of Chuck, exactly as the title says.

 

The less you know beforehand about the specifics of the story and how it unfolds, the better, so I’ll say as little about it as possible. Many of the joys of the film are in how it makes the often unexpected connections between its narrative threads.  This is especially true of the strange, slightly surreal, and particularly unexpected first act of the film, of which I will say absolutely nothing more, besides that Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, and Matthew Lillard all deliver phenomenal performances. In the most broad sense, the film is just a series of key moments – ones that in retrospect are life-defining, but in the midst of them just feel like moments – in the life of one Charles Krantz (played at various ages by Benjamin Pajak, Jacob Tremblay, and Tom Hiddleston, all of whom are outstanding). Through these moments, we come to understand the multitude that Chuck and every other person around him contains (to paraphrase the Walt Whitman poem that figures heavily into the themes of the film).

 

Two other key figures, in Chuck’s life and in the film, are his grandparents, played by Mia Sara and Mark Hamill, and it is so cool to see these two actors get such great roles. Mark Hamill, of course, has never really been able to escape from Luke Skywalker’s shadow, and has gotten very few opportunities to show what he can do as a dramatic actor, when he isn’t just being stunt-cast as Star Wars’ Mark Hamill. This is the first time I can think of when I have ever seen Hamill just get to disappear into a role, as a closed-off but loving Jewish grandfather who sees poetry in mathematics, quietly grieves, and has a secret that plays into the film’s sense of magical realism. And Mia Sara has been retired from acting for a couple decades, with her 80s-icon past of Ferris Bueller and Legend put behind her. It’s so cool to see her come out of retirement and make such a triumphant return with such a great, vibrant performance.

 

These casting choices, giving wonderful roles to actors who usually don’t get roles like that, is a larger trend in not only this film, but Mike Flanagan’s productions in general, and I absolutely love it. Flanagan is an obvious, passionate film nerd, and he is great at identifying when a beloved but often typecast genre-film actor has dramatic talent that they never really get to show in the niches they are stuck in. In addition to Hamill and Sara, in this film he also gives great, one-scene roles to Matthew Lillard (getting to seriously act like he did in Twin Peaks season 3, and not just be asked to do the manic Matthew Lillard thing) and Heather Langenkamp (of the Nightmare on Elm Street series). This is very much an ensemble film (particularly given that Chuck is played by multiple actors throughout his life), and the whole ensemble is uniformly great.

Mike Flanagan is a fantastic filmmaker, with an auteur’s voice that feels very unique and special, even if almost all of his projects are literary adaptations. Much like King himself, the majority of his projects (The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher, Doctor Sleep) are nominal horror stories that, yes, are very atmospheric and frightening, but have a deeper staying power and resonance because they are also thoughtfully-observed human dramas with a lot to say about their characters. This is his first time fully leaving the horror genre, but his auteur’s voice is still absolutely distinctive. His screenwriting is superb, and very thoughtful, his handling of actors is excellent, and he has an eye for gorgeous visuals that is perfect for the big screen. The Life of Chuck is a beautifully shot movie. It also has a transcendent dance sequence in the middle (the centerpiece of the marketing of the film) which is a staggeringly confident piece of directorial craft. Who would have thought that between this and Sinners, we would have two genre-adjacent movies this year with unexpectedly stunning dance numbers in the middle?

It is absolutely shameful that most theaters have pulled most of this movie’s evening showtimes after less than two weeks, and haven’t given it any time to build up the word of mouth that a hard-to-market film like this needs, and definitely deserves. This film deserves better, and Mike Flanagan definitely deserves better. Between this and Doctor Sleep, he is two for two with making some of the best Stephen King adaptations of recent years (or ever) that no one gets to see on the big screen. I just hope that, as with Doctor Sleep or The Shawshank Redemption before it (which likewise was famously a complete flop before becoming one of the best-loved films of the 1990s), The Life of Chuck is able to find its audience on home media, and becomes embraced as the great film that it is. It deserves to find an audience, and Mike Flanagan deserves to get to keep making films like this.

 

- Christopher S. Jordan