In 2013, Flanagan premiered Oculus at TIFF. This past Friday, he told a packed Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto that that night in 2013 changed his life and kickstarted his career. Eleven years later, he is still working with similar themes and some of the same actors (Karen Gillan and Analise Basso return to his ensemble here), but he has evolved as a craftsman and as a humanist. This is his most emotionally raw piece of work since The Haunting of Hill House.
I read the novella this is based on a year or so ago, part of an anthology called If it Bleeds, released in 2020. I knew Flanagan had been attached and was extremely curious how faithful he would be to King’s writing this time. I like the novella, but found it very mysterious, uniquely structured, and detailed in a way that would be difficult to portray on screen. To my surprise, it’s an extremely faithful adaptation. At the same time, I will mention that if there are things he’s added, I may not have noticed. King and Flanagan are simpatico here.
Nick Offerman narrates the film, which I was distracted by at first. I’ve listened to a book on tape read by Offerman before. Also, the narration he’s reading is verbatim from the book. I very much felt at times like it was an audiobook playing out with the visuals. I was able to shake this feeling as the movie went on. While Offerman never becomes great, like, say, Alec Baldwin in The Royal Tenenbaums, there is a speech about halfway through to which he gives a subtle yet lovely flourish. It floored me.
The film is told in three acts in reverse-chronological order. It is, in a singularly disjointed way, the story of Charles Krantz (Chuck to his friends). In Act III (shown to us first), Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan plays Marty and Fel who, along with his whole town (a town full of actors throwing fast balls in only one or two scenes, including David Dastmalchian, Matthew Lilliard, and Carl Lumbly), keeps seeing the same ad congratulating Chuck for “39 Great Years.” The ad is constant -- billboards, TV, even podcasts. The thing is, nobody knows who Chuck is and where he’s spent 39 years worth congratulating for. Act II and Act I go on to solve that mystery in a profound way that also answers the question: who are all those people in this town, a question we begin to ask as the film keeps going.
In Act II, Chuck is in his late 30s and is played by Tom Hiddleston. When I heard he’d been cast, I thought that with a big star like that, Flanagan must’ve bulked out the second act in the script. Really only a few moments are described in the second act of the book, but those moments mean a lot. Like I said earlier, this is an extremely faithful adaptation, but even though Hiddleston is only in it for these moments, he makes a real feast of it, getting to do an impressive bit of choreography that had the auditorium I was in shaking with applause. It shows Flanagan’s commitment to making every moment count. By casting such a famous actor, it really forces us to pay attention to Chuck. The people in the town in the third act see him on the billboard and see just a guy, so they at first don’t think much about him. We see him and think “that’s that guy we know from film and TV, and also this movie is called The Life of Chuck, so we better keep thinking about this guy.” Also, Hiddleston is able to build a guy we really care about in these scenes. It’s nice to see him as something other than a Loki.
In Act I, the final act, we see Chuck’s childhood, played by three child actors; Cody Flanagan (son of Mike and Actress, Kate Siegel, who is also in this act), Benjamin Pajak, and Jacob Tremblay. This act is the meatiest and has a lot of exciting performances by actors who’ve worked with Flanagan before, including Mark Hamill (The Fall of the House of Usher), Heather Langenkamp (The Midnight Club), Samantha Sloyan (Midnight Mass and others), and Mia Sara (her first time collaborating with Flanagan, but she is of course, Sloane Peterson).
Chuck is a sensitive child, the type that would grow up to be the gentle kind of guy that we saw Tom Hiddleston play. The adults in this boy’s life are all on their own path of self discovery and it’s in watching them, Chuck learns a lesson that will prove deeply important once he finds out the truth about the attic that his grandfather always told him not to enter. Maybe I’m being a bit obtuse here. I wrote a whole paragraph describing exactly what that lesson he learns is, but realized that it would kind of be a big spoiler. I know it’s not like a "Bruce Willis is Haley Joel Osment’s father" type spoiler (or something like that), but it hits pretty hard and even though I’d read the book, Jacob Tremblay saying a certain sentence caught me off guard, left me in tears.
It’s easy to see why Flanagan connected to King’s novella. There are themes here that are all over Flanagan’s previous projects: death, family, childhood trauma, the fragile line between the past and present. What I fear people may bump up against here is the sentimentality. King and Flanagan are both not afraid of heartfeltness in their works. Even Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep had certain amounts of saccharinity, but they were also extremely violent stories. When there’s all that darkness there, it's easy for people to forget the stuff they’d typically turn their nose at. I know I’m creating a bit of a straw man here (I haven’t read any other reactions -- I was at the damn world premiere, after all), but my argument to this cynical person who doesn’t exist would be that this movie earns its heart on its sleeve by presenting an honest view of the world where very bad things do happen, but the movie is more interested in how we overcome. Where darkness exists, so can light. I highly recommend The Life of Chuck.
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