The Life of Chuck
Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of a Stephen King short story is faithful to a fault.
As Stephen King’s short stories go, “The Life of Chuck” is strange. It’s closer to “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” than it is to “The Monkey.” The story shows King tilting away from horror, though it makes use of a sort of magical realism that maintains a spooky edge. King’s stories, at their best, assert that humanity is worth it, even in the darkest of circumstances, so it’s no wonder Mike Flanagan—who created Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House for Netflix, and who previously adapted the King novels Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep—gravitated toward it. Ultimately, his adaptation is faithful to a fault.
Both short story and movie comprise three acts, each one circling a portion of Chuck Krantz’s life. Chuck (played at different stages of his life by Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay, Benjamin Pajak, and Cody Flanagan) is an ordinary Midwestern guy who works as an accountant and who happens to be a pretty good dancer. He’s marked by sadness and human mortality but ultimately not doomed by it. “His life is narrower than what he’s hoped for,” says the narrator in voiceover (Nick Offerman, directly quoting the source material), though he’s philosophical about the way human lives tend to shrink and tighten as people get older, with friends falling by the wayside in favor of work or family. Chuck finds his joy where he can get it, most memorably on a sunny afternoon in a city plaza, dancing to a beat laid down by a busking drummer. Flanagan is warm toward Chuck too. The narrator tells us that at a later time, in a moment of pain, “He will remember that he stopped and dropped his briefcase and moved his hips to the beat of the drum, and think, ‘This is why God made the world.’”
It’s a lovely sentiment, a delicate observation weighing present pain against past pleasure and finding the scales tipped in favor of joy. In another sequence, at a moment when it seems that the whole world is coming to an end, the story’s characters wonder whether divorce or marriage are more common. Ultimately they decide on marriage—it’s more hopeful. The Life of Chuck tips its hand: it’s an optimistic story about the inherent worth of every living being.
It feels good to watch Chuck dance in the plaza; Hiddleston, his dance partner (Annalise Basso), and the drummer who brings them together (Taylor Gordon, better known as The Pocket Queen) share an affable chemistry together. Flanagan understands how to frame dancers so that we can take in the action all at once. But he also keeps pressing his thumb on the scale to ensure that the balance remains uneven: the scene continues after Chuck’s dance, drenched in late-afternoon golden warmth, thick and buttery. The cinematography in the rest of the film carries that same golden cast in times of joy and an eerie blue-green hue in more sorrowful sequences. The story is rife with ideas that should make us feel complex emotions, but the film doesn’t trust the audience to tilt the “right” way, so it dictates how we should be feeling at any given moment, an instinct that removes ambiguity in favor of sentimentality.
This approach fits the story too well. “The Life of Chuck” is Stephen King at his most optimistic, a tidy tale presented in a strangely circular structure that raises more questions at the end than it does at the beginning. Flanagan’s interpretation is too clean. It takes the story entirely at face value, shading in a few details here and there but remaining stubbornly faithful to the text itself, refusing to be curious about King’s neat little bow that ties off the story. The film’s production design is clean and calm, nearly anonymous with a hint of nostalgia: a look that aims for timelessness and strips away the specificity that might otherwise have anchored its optimism. It’s pleasant enough but oddly smooth, all possible edges sanded off.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★☆☆
The Life of Chuck is in wide release now.
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