The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan, 2024)

[brundlefly]

TIFF People's Choice Awards:

Winner: The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan)
First Runner-up: Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
Second Runner-up: Anora (Sean Baker)

The Flanagan film came out of nowhere and absolutely no one was talking about it or expecting it to win until it screened, and even then it winning was a shock. The other two were very expected

It sounds very much of a piece with the Darabont King movies, sentimental favorites that your parents will like

Definitely the way NEON's teaser leans. "From... the heart and soul of Mike Flanagan" squarely aims at an audience missing its gag reflex.

[Never Cursed]

The Life of Chuck has been chucked to next summer by Neon, so remove all current Oscar hopes for that one

Highly positive response from weenie critics in surprise advance screenings, who note how sappy and "life-affirming" it is and assume it will be a big player come awards season

[Never Cursed]

The Life of Chuck has been chucked to next summer by Neon, so remove all current Oscar hopes for that one

Highly positive response from weenie critics in surprise advance screenings, who note how sappy and "life-affirming" it is and assume it will be a big player come awards season

And clearly we did not see the same movie. Sappy and maudlin I will grant these critics, but I really fail to see where optimism or an affirmation of life can be found in a story so myopic as to tie the fate of the entire universe to one dying guy and kill both in the process (this is not a spoiler, it happens in the first 30 minutes of the film). All movies manipulate, but it's been a while (probably the last time was The Whale, and surely if you loved that here's your new favorite film) that a big mainstream offering has so cloyingly and irritatingly begged for unearned tears. From what I understand the film is a note-for-note retelling of the source material, so I won't blame Flanagan for much and can even congratulate him on many competent or good component parts, but the movie's first act of cosmic pessimism is not only rotely related (its structure is more or less just "Chiwetel Ejiofor walks around and finds people who soliloquize and cry in front of him"), but insultingly over-emoted and under-explained. There doesn't need to be a happy or perfect or even complete resolution to the apocalyptic set-up, but something to make the first act into anything more than a protracted free-associative walloping intended to set up the subsequent story would have helped. I understand, too, that the personal and global crises so depicted are metaphors for global warming, political unrest, and various forms of mass death that destabilize our lives and rip us out of our skin, but I cannot find the film's attitude of "living my life in spite of the awful things is the best I can do" anything but a childish surrender to whatever might come. No one can seriously promise anyone else that their life will be easy, but shouldn't living to make yourself okay be the start rather than the end of your emotional engagement with the world? When I got out of the theater, I briefly checked Twitter and saw all sorts of yawning, terrifying social problems without easy or plausibly immediate solutions: the ICE raids and subsequent protests in Los Angeles, violence in Palestine, various effects of climate change, etc. Where would any of us be if we treated these problems the way that the film (and presumably the story) treats them, as abstract disasters to be succumbed to rather than fought against? Are we really just going to go gentle, as this film suggests, into that good night?

Many years ago a much more perceptive film than this gave a lecture on the birth and death of the universe very similar to the one found in this film and followed it up with the dismissal "What does he (the lecturer) know about Man alone?" The caveat, of course, was that this line is spoken by a child whose emotional problems tragically preclude him from reaching maturity, but this film allegedly for adults cannot help but replicate the same juvenile perspective.

[beamish14]

The Life of Chuck has been chucked to next summer by Neon, so remove all current Oscar hopes for that one

Highly positive response from weenie critics in surprise advance screenings, who note how sappy and "life-affirming" it is and assume it will be a big player come awards season

And clearly we did not see the same movie. Sappy and maudlin I will grant these critics, but I really fail to see where optimism or an affirmation of life can be found in a story so myopic as to tie the fate of the entire universe to one dying guy and kill both in the process (this is not a spoiler, it happens in the first 30 minutes of the film). All movies manipulate, but it's been a while (probably the last time was The Whale, and surely if you loved that here's your new favorite film) that a big mainstream offering has so cloyingly and irritatingly begged for unearned tears. From what I understand the film is a note-for-note retelling of the source material, so I won't blame Flanagan for much and can even congratulate him on many competent or good component parts, but the movie's first act of cosmic pessimism is not only rotely related (its structure is more or less just "Chiwetel Ejiofor walks around and finds people who soliloquize and cry in front of him"), but insultingly over-emoted and under-explained. There doesn't need to be a happy or perfect or even complete resolution to the apocalyptic set-up, but something to make the first act into anything more than a protracted free-associative walloping intended to set up the subsequent story would have helped. I understand, too, that the personal and global crises so depicted are metaphors for global warming, political unrest, and various forms of mass death that destabilize our lives and rip us out of our skin, but I cannot find the film's attitude of "living my life in spite of the awful things is the best I can do" anything but a childish surrender to whatever might come. No one can seriously promise anyone else that their life will be easy, but shouldn't living to make yourself okay be the start rather than the end of your emotional engagement with the world? When I got out of the theater, I briefly checked Twitter and saw all sorts of yawning, terrifying social problems without easy or plausibly immediate solutions: the ICE raids and subsequent protests in Los Angeles, violence in Palestine, various effects of climate change, etc. Where would any of us be if we treated these problems the way that the film (and presumably the story) treats them, as abstract disasters to be succumbed to rather than fought against? Are we really just going to go gentle, as this film suggests, into that good night?

Many years ago a much more perceptive film than this gave a lecture on the birth and death of the universe very similar to the one found in this film and followed it up with the dismissal "What does he (the lecturer) know about Man alone?" The caveat, of course, was that this line is spoken by a child whose emotional problems tragically preclude him from reaching maturity, but this film allegedly for adults cannot help but replicate the same juvenile perspective.

I have no real interest in this, as Mike Flanagan really doesn’t impress me, but did Mia Sara leave any kind of impression? I was shocked to learn that she has a relatively big supporting part in this, which might be her first major film since appearing in forum favorite Peter Hyams’ Timecop in 1994

[The Curious Sofa]

i read an interview with Mia Sara and she said she came out of retirement because Flanagan is a good friend of her's and her husband Brian Henson and he convinced her to take the role. I'm also not that convinced by Flanagan, I like a few of his films, but I find his TV series wildly overrated. I dread what he will do to Stephen King's Carrie next.

[domino harvey]

Cahiers gave the Life of Chuck full stars, so it must be awful

[Brian C]

Went to see The Life of Chuck a couple days ago, and it's a truly odd duck of a film. I'm not really sure how this gets described as "optimistic" or "life-affirming" or whatever, because it feels to me that the actual takeaway from the film is sorta depressing if not outright off-putting. I don't want to trip over spoilers here - and honestly, I'm not 100% sure what would actually be a spoiler for this film - so I'll just put the rest behind spoiler tags:

Spoiler

To start out with, the film takes what seems to me to be a pretty inane reading from Whitman's line "I am large, I contain multitudes." In the film, this line is reduced to merely an assertion that we are all the sum of our experiences - our memories, the people we meet, and so forth. This seems kinda dumb, but whatever.

Weirdly, the film builds around this notion in a bizarrely literal way - so that when Chuck is dying, the people that he's known, which apparently exist in their own universe within his psyche (or something), all die themselves in a confusing, depressing, end-of-the-world scenario. This is how the film opens, by telling us about how record numbers of people have committed suicide during a string of natural disasters, and all the survivors are confused and lonely and scared.

The second and third acts (or second and first, I guess) pretty much forget any of this ever happened, except that it has the audience basically playing "Where's Waldo" spotting the characters and scenarios from the first act (or third act, I guess) in Chuck's actual life. Hey, there's a glimpse of Chiwetel Ejiofor as Chuck's teacher! There's the girl on roller skates! There's the locked door again! Hey, it's that same Carl Sagan lecture! Oh, THAT is why all the EKGs were beeping all the same! Etc., etc.

The film ends with a teenage Chuck seeing a vision of his death and resolving to live a good life. Big freaking deal ... but still, I suppose this might have carried some weight if we knew anything about how Chuck put this into practice, either for good or bad. But the adult Chuck is simply a non-entity in the film. We know he has a wife and kid, but they're not a factor in the story at all, and we know he becomes an accountant, but the movie couldn't care less about what his work life is like, either. His one big, life-affirming (literally, as the narration tells us) moment is an impromptu dance with a stranger, but even in the aftermath of this, he doesn't have any discernible personality, to the point where the film has to rely on a narrator to tell us even the basics about Chuck's state of mind.

And it turns out that this dance is just a callback to Chuck's childhood anyway, not even a spontaneous thing as much as reliving a key childhood memory. In fact, the total sum of Chuck's adult life as portrayed by the film is memories from his childhood. So what we have here is a movie about a guy who seems not to progress mentally from his preteen years, who dies young and then a part of everyone he knows dies a horribly sad and frightening death along with him.

Like I say, just seemed very odd to me. The movie is very much made as if we in the audience are expected to find this all cosmically profound and life-affirming, but I think it's an incoherent conceptual mess.

[black&huge]

Now onto what is one of the worst of 2025. The Life of Chuck

Spoiler

I feel the biggest mistake with this film inadvertently exposed it for what it actually is. That mistake being the trailer. It has to be one of the worst trailers I have EVER seen in my life. Just a back-patting, ego-driven talk up of some glorious life story that will touch people to the core hammered in by having the nerve to peddle the movie "From the heart of Mike Flanagan". The trailer was Simpson's level of parody. So my biggest fear would have been if the movie turned out in any way like the trailer and unfortuntely it is every bit accurate. From the moment the movie opens and for no reason at all the bittersweet score plays over for what seems like 5 minutes but there's absolutely no correlating emotion going in the scenes. It reeks of "please be sad because this movie is so serious but great" while people are just tlaking about an internet outage and no pornhub. Karen Gillan is sitting in a chair looking sad so why not have that same music also double down because it's apparently not enough for someone to act sad.

As echoed above there's no real reason we should feel anything for anyone in this movie. The backwards structure does nothing for the actual story and I want to blame the source material since I hear it closely follows it. We don't see enough adult Chuck and how he even affected anyone by being alive. We get the standard "parents die then people close to him die" third act that shapes him but what this film really needed was connective tissue and a formal structure. It's a real shame since I'm a fan of Flanagan's and LOVE Doctor Sleep but he really overestimated himself here taking on King material that isn't horror. There could have been so much opporunity for experimentation with editing and characters if he just didn't follow the source material as is. There's nothing in this movie to take away.

[Murdoch]

I just caught Life of Chuck on a 15-hour plane ride and will admit to enjoying it (although that likely has more to do with how wild I found the plotting, enough to keep the attention of my sleep-deprived mind).

The rote sentimentality of Benjamin Button is pretty prevalent here, with characters not really defined and more following certain emotional beats/cliches (of course the free spirited title character is an accountant who wanted to be a dancer). I was glad to see Mia Sara in a role after so long, she has that cool aunt vibe to her now that she's got gray in her hair. Ejiofor was the standout though and really should have been the focus instead of that Hiddleston guy. He's an actor who I find excels in every role, no matter how small or underwritten, and here he carries this film when he's onscreen.

As for the plot itself, it definitely feels like Flanagan trying (and failing) for the emotional highs of his TV series. I think he's a filmmaker who is always attempting to reach some metaphysical high of intertwined human connection, but here he overdoes it by laying heavy on the apocalyptic exposition upfront, giving viewers (or at least me) some hopes of a Haunting of Hill House finale expanding this premise, but which never comes to fruition.

Spoiler

Hiddleston's character feels like such a letdown after an enormous amount of buildup to his reveal. Making the character the standard movie "Average Joe" is fine but the brief snippit of a life story feels like something left on the cutting room floor of Forrest Gump.

This all may stem from issues with the source material but it's got Flanagan',s signature all over it.

The act structure of this really kills it IMO