When Mike Flanagan’s “The Life of Chuck” debuted at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, it won the coveted People’s Choice Award. The award typically indicates big Oscar prospects in a movie’s future (since 2012, every movie that has won the award has at least been nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards). So, when “The Life of Chuck” won the top prize, it was surprising it took time to get picked up by a distributor and even more surprising that NEON chose to save the movie for 2025 (another of their films, “Anora,” which placed third at TIFF, went on to win Best Picture in the 2025 Academy Awards).
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The win by Flanagan’s film was a bit of a surprise, given the heavy hitters at the 2024 festival, but it’s a movie factory-made for festival adulation. It strikes the right chord of being pleasant, without being particularly deep, which sends moviegoers out on a gratified high that they just watched something meaningful. It’s just a shame “The Life of Chuck” does a lot of talking without ever saying anything.
Based on a short story by Stephen King, the film is a triptych told in reverse. It opens with act three, where Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is teaching Walt Whitman to his students. A trickle of whispers and murmurs begin rolling through the classroom when the students see on their phones that an earthquake has rocked California. It doesn’t seem like just any old earthquake, though; perhaps the end is near. To make things more puzzling throughout the chaos, Marty keeps seeing billboards thanking a man named Chuck.
Acts two and three focus the movie around Chuck Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), who isn’t onscreen for much of the movie, but his presence lingers. Chuck is a seemingly ordinary man who works at a bank, but the movie’s reverse timeline allows more of Chuck’s past to come into focus (the younger versions of Chuck are played by Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay).
“The Life of Chuck” certainly has no bad intentions and will leave some viewers with a sense of hope and wonderment. But, the movie is a shallow reflection on the meaning of life and as generic as that may sound, it’s how “The Life of Chuck” plays out. There’s so much stretching for awe-inspiring profundity, someone must have pulled a muscle.
Everyone in the cast is doing their best with the material and there are some passing effective moments (Mark Hamill has some nice moments as Chuck’s grandfather Albie), but “The Life of Chuck” misses the mark on what it’s trying to do. The deeper meaning of the movie gets buried by platitudes and bumper sticker speeches, which feel designed for actor showcases, not to propel a movie forward. “The Life of Chuck” wants the audience to leave the theater moved to tears, but its desperation to do so becomes far too obvious.
“The Life of Chuck” opens in theaters on Friday, June 13.
Matt Passantino is a contributor to CITY.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
