God bless my guy Mike Flanagan. He’s never gonna settle, and always gonna take some swings with his movie choices. For the 90th time from me…for gosh sakes, he made a movie about a killer mirror, and IT WORKED! And after pushing through the decent Doctor Sleep, The Life of Chuck is no big deal; it’s only ambitious for him cause he’s never really made a movie without supernatural r rated gore before.
Chuck’s life is told in 3 parts. 1 part is his early days (played by Benjamin Pajak), where he’s raised by his grandparents Albie (Mark Hamill) and Sarah Krantz (Mia Sara) in a cute little anytown USA. Another part sees older Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) end up in anysuburb USA for a work conference, having a fascinating lunch break with Taylor (The Pocket Queen) and Janice Halliday (Annalise Basso). The final part is when Chuck is near retirement, and various people like teacher Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and nurse Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillan) keep running into his billboards across town, wondering how special this man was.
The reason Mike Flanagan’s horror movies work is because we’re completely invested in the characters inside of his stories, making all the supernatural elements around them wow or scare just a little bit harder. He’s done wonders here, amassing his all star acting team to tell Chuck’s life story, with some lovely new additions. Annalise Basso, Carl Lumbly, Karen Gillan, Violet McGraw, and Kate Siegel, all have done something in the Flanagan world, and acquit themselves to their new characters as expected: the overqualified bench of the movie. This makes those main characters, the starters, jobs all that much easier. Chiwetel Ejiofor has been slumming around Marvel for people to forget how great he can be with a great party like Marty Anderson, which he becomes the bleeding heart of along with Karen Gillan. Part 2 Chuck is magnetically played by Tom Hiddleston, who’s never been more charming and lovable than he is here, even stripped of his British accent. Chuck, Flanagan smartly realizes that even though he’s the title character, only part 1 has the real character “Chuck” inside it. And that one’s easy: cast a kid who’s kinda small and cute in glasses, and has a great sad face, which Benjamin Pajak does. The real MVPs are grandma and grandpa. Mark Hamill shows again why he’s more than just the Star Wars and Batman voice guy. But the big winner here is Mia Sara, every 80s kids favorite girlfriend, who hasn’t done anything in 11 years and instantly becomes everyone’s favorite grandma with what she does here. The light inside of Sarah Krantz is the beautiful North Star this movie hinges upon, and Sara delivers that beauty with a radiant smile and finger pointing to the sky on the beat.
So with this incredible team put together for him, Flanagan just has to be the coach and build a strategy for them to succeed. A lot of this is in King’s story, but his adaptation does a great job sucking you in. The first act onscreen is a great way to start, helping disorient the viewer a bit with what is really going on, and what type of movie they’ve signed up for. While immersing us in that world, we’re getting pieces of the rest of the story unbeknownst to us, which Flanagan uses at critical junctures of the other parts. The soundtrack makes sure that the parts cohere into one giant tale, never straying too far tonally from one another. I was pleasantly along for the ride, all they way until one key juncture, I couldn’t help it; my feelings just overwhelmed my senses, at the Boyhood like power of what Flanagan was able to pull off and put together. I wasn’t watching The Life of Chuck: I was experiencing it as Flanagan, and I hope happens to you as well.
In the wrong hands, The Life of Chuck would have been an abject disaster, something like Collateral Beauty. But Mike Flanagan wills this film to make sure it rises above it’s pitfall hell and into the closest to what Stephen King would think of as his personal heaven. I applaud good ol’Mike not giving into his worst urges, and having Mark Hamill force choke someone at a school dance, making the Star Wars/Carrie crossover that was sitting right there if he wanted it. I guess he’s a better man than I.