What is the value of a human life? I mean, a single human life? How much does any one individual person matter, considered against the grand sweep of history and the cosmos?
That’s the question that writer-director Mike Flanagan (“Midnight Mass,” “Doctor Sleep”) considers in his new film “The Life of Chuck,” based on the Stephen King story of the same name. The film tells the story of Charles “Chuck” Kranz (Tom Hiddleston) in reverse, moving backwards into his childhood. It’s a very ordinary life: He is an accountant living in the Midwestern suburbs with his wife and son, and appears to be one of millions of faceless working stiffs. But as the film peels back layers of time and history, we discover that, ordinary though it may be, Chuck’s life is full of joyous, heartbreaking significance.
Which answers our question. What is the value of a single human life? Infinite. Because, as “The Life of Chuck” sets out to prove, every person contains a universe.
Flanagan is a well-known King fan and has adapted his work before. At a virtual press conference that I attended for America, Flanagan said: “I’m always watching it from the perspective of the Stephen King fan I am, to figure out how mad at me I would be if I was just seeing the movie in a theater.” As a fellow King devotee, I sympathize. But that reverence is both a benefit and a hindrance to the film.
On one hand Flanagan perfectly captures King’s wit and heart, and his rare talent for balancing the mundane and the supernatural (“The Life of Chuck” is closer in tone to “Stand By Me” than “The Shining”). On the other hand, Flanagan is often so reverent of the text that he hardly strays from it, even when deviations might better suit the cinematic medium. Nick Offerman narrates the story, delivering huge chunks of King’s prose over the action. This is sometimes very funny or moving, but can also feel like having an audiobook running in the background.
If Flanagan has a trademark directorial indulgence, it’s having spectacular actors deliver lengthy monologues. “Life of Chuck” is no different, and many are undeniably compelling: Chuck’s grandfather (Mark Hamill) waxing poetic about the beauty of math; Chuck’s teacher (Katie Siegel) explaining Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”; a man (Chiwetel Ejiofor) reflecting on the brevity of human history over the phone as the world crumbles outside. But there’s a limit to how cinematically engaging it can be to watch one person talking.
The most powerful moments, tellingly, are the ones with no words. Chief among them are two ebullient dance sequences: one where the adult Chuck dances with a stranger (Annalise Basso) on a busy street to the beat of a busker drummer (musician Taylor Gordon, also known as the Pocket Queen), and another where a young Chuck (Benjamin Pajak, in a performance that marks him as someone to watch) discovers his confidence at a middle school dance. The Hiddleston/Basso dance is in many ways the film’s skeleton key: a small, slice-of-life moment that takes on cosmic significance in context. In that sequence, Flanagan and the performers offer a vibrant, visual expression of connection and joy and healing rendered entirely through movement.
Of course, this is a Stephen King adaptation, and it occasionally chills your blood when it’s not warming your heart. In the opening chapter a divorced couple—high school teacher Marty (Ejiofor) and E.R. nurse Felicia (Karen Gillan)—faces a series of apocalyptic events: The Internet collapses, earthquakes shake California into the sea, the stars begin to go out. These scenes echo the anxiety of early Covid, the mix of dread and bafflement at every new unthinkable development (unsurprisingly, that was when Flanagan first read this story). There’s also a sort of ghost story nestled into Chuck’s childhood days, spent at the home of his grandparents, Albie (Hamill) and Sarah (Mia Sara, her first film role in over a decade). Albie is haunted by what seem to be premonitions of the future, inescapable visions of death.
These plotlines get at the film’s other main thematic strand, a companion question to “What is a life worth?”: How do we face life’s inevitable end? Flanagan, who was raised Catholic but eventually left the faith, espouses a humanist philosophy that understands the end of life as the end. But even for those of us who believe that life goes on beyond death, the question has incredible weight. What do we do with the time that we have? When the clock is running down, what matters most?
At this point you might be saying: “The apocalypse? Premonitions? Dance sequences? What is going on in this movie?” I admit, there’s a lot; and while the film’s three chapters are each strong in their own right, they don’t always cohere into a satisfying whole. But that serves the film’s themes as well: Life is also complicated and rich, a freewheeling blend of “genres” and emotions. The film returns a few times to Whitman’s assertion that “I am large, I contain multitudes.” At the press conference, Flanagan quoted King’s own take on that idea: “Every time a person dies, a library burns down.”
“The Life of Chuck” works best when it blends the particular with the universal. Chuck’s life is rich in unique and infinite ways, but the real beauty is that this is true of every life. Chuck doesn’t need to be a superhero or a secret agent (or, say, a god of mischief) for his story to matter. He only needs to be human.
‘The Life of Chuck’ was released in select theaters in the United States on June 6 before expanding nationwide on June 13.
