Stephen King and writer-director Mike Flanagan, of Netflix hits such as Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House, are an ideal match. Both possess monstrous imaginations and pure hearts, tending towards horror with an ability to imagine a better future. Flanagan’s touched many of the greats – Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe – in his horror series. But when he collides with King, in Gerald’s Game (2017), The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep (2019), and, now, The Life of Chuck, it’s like watching two people speak with the same voice.
The Life of Chuck is reverentially faithful to King’s novella, published in his 2020 collection If It Bleeds. And, admittedly, those particularly infatuated by either his or Flanagan’s work will likely find themselves richly rewarded by the film. But it also loses out on one of the most thrilling aspects of adaptation – the sense of one artist wrestling with another’s ideas, trying to make sense of them in their own language and, in turn, sparking a kind of combative electricity.
That’s what made Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining a masterpiece, whatever King’s own objections to it might be. The Life of Chuck goes down too smooth and too easy for a story that’s already one of King’s most unabashedly sentimental works, venturing into that rather unpleasant territory we call “treacly”.
It was always the danger for an idea King first had when he was struck with a sudden thought while watching a busker beat out a tune on a few overturned plastic buckets: what if a businessman were to suddenly drop his briefcase and dance?
This scene forms the middle act of three, which, for reasons that gradually become clear, is told backwards. Businessman Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) strolls past a drummer (musician Taylor Gordon, known as The Pocket Queen) who shifts the beat to give it an enticing, soulful allure. He’s drawn in – fingers counting the beat, feet kissing the floor in balletic circles.
Flanagan finds the rhythm of the scene, especially after a young woman (Annalise Basso), recently dumped, joins in as Chuck’s partner. There are shades of the same golden age musicals we discover a young Chuck grew up devouring. Hiddleston has the moves. He shakes his hips like a ferret trying to evade capture. But there’s also a harsh, sterilised look to the whole affair – the town they live in is a little Disney Worldish – that saps the romanticism out of it and replaces it with the forced jubilance of a flashmob.
The scene is both unconnected and deeply pivotal to the chapters that precede and follow it. In the first act (or should we say third), teacher Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his ex-wife Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillan), a nurse, face the end of the world. California is slipping away, chunk by chunk; the internet is down; and sinkholes are swallowing up the route to work, taking several souls with them. People wrestle with finality, with what seems like a cosmic joke – made all the crueller by the fact, everywhere they turn, television and radios won’t stop broadcasting the words, “Charles Krantz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!”
The last act (or should we say first) dives into Chuck’s childhood, where he’s played by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak, and Jacob Tremblay over the years, and raised by his grandparents (Mia Sara and Mark Hamill). It introduces a supernatural element dwelling at the top of their Victorian home, in the cupola.
The enigmatic quality of King’s story, the sense that these characters matter to us only as the necessary pieces of a very tidy metaphor, means The Life of Chuck leans into both the author and director’s worst impulses. No one really talks like a person here. Neither do they talk in a way that takes much pleasure in the beauty of language. No – they’re here purely to deliver information, either about what the story is or what it means.
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Characters inform other characters about recent history they would both, presumably, know about already. There are lengthy monologues deconstructing Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar, and the sanctity of maths. King and Flanagan are of one mind here. All these things are of vital importance to them. But for a film that’s meant to be about the fleeting, miraculous gift of life – well, it doesn’t feel like there’s all that much living happening here.
Dir: Mike Flanagan. Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Mia Sara, Carl Lumbly, Benjamin Pajak, Jacob Tremblay, Mark Hamill. Cert 15, 111 minutes.
‘The Life of Chuck’ is in cinemas from 22 August
