Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King Adaptation Unabashedly Wears Its Heart On Its Sleeve, Mostly For Better
“The Life of Chuck” won the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, which historically is a huge precursor to be in Oscar contention. But all of a sudden, it got postponed a year, and here we are, a weird sort-of summer release that has a chance at slipping under the radar instead of gaining popularity being a big awards season tentpole.
Which is a total shame, because “The Life of Chuck” is awesome, a wild combination of storytelling elements and tones that just shouldn’t fit well together, but do. It’s half a cosmic existential horror movie, half earnest and innocent coming of age movie and, for me, fascinating the whole time.
“Chuck” starts off as a genuine Armageddon-set, anxiety-inducing horror drama that was legit distressing. But after a big time twist, pivots to recount the life of our titular character, Chuck, one afternoon as an adult then several years over his childhood. It’s a really interesting script structure, and telling the story in reverse lends some pretty cool retrospective context to events you’ve already seen.
There’s also some incredibly fulfilling themes at work here, all about humanity’s place in an occasionally grim, seemingly vast universe where it seems none of us belong or matter. Some critics are bashing “Chuck” for maybe being too simple and also too flagrant in how it flaunts this theme, but Jesus, can’t we just have a movie with an absurdly positive message? How many of those do we even have?
My only real beefs were that, even with the structure and themes, the movie’s a little thin when it comes to the story it’s telling, and especially the characters. Chuck and his friends and family are meant to be portrayed as ordinary people, and they are, but they’re also not given a ton of depth. They’re more like vessels used to carry the message of the story.
But when the message is just so damn nice, who really cares?