Stephen King is the contemporary author whose work has been most frequently adapted into movies – it’s not even close, with King averaging nearly an adaptation per year for the past 40-plus years, mirroring his astonishingly prolific writing career. (And that’s just counting the traditional movies, not TV miniseries.) Most of these titles are horror or horror-adjacent thrillers, albeit with King’s impressive range of the genre that encompasses grounded psychological realism, crazy supernatural occurrences, full-on apocalypses, and whatever The Dark Tower is. (I truly don’t know; there are too many King books to keep track of!) But though these adaptations have produced several horror/thriller classics like Carrie, The Dead Zone, and The Shining, from filmmakers like Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg, and Stanley Kubrick, there’s a rarer form of King movie where a few filmmakers have set their sights: the horror-free humanist tearjerker. It was only a matter of time until Mike Flanagan, who has tackled past King projects Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep in addition a litany of acclaimed horror TV shows, tried his hand at it. It’s easy to read his new film The Life of Chuck, adapted from a King story, as his shot at non-horror immortality.
As a King acolyte, Flanagan is doubtless aware of the twin pillars of non-horror adaptations: Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, both adapted from novellas within the non-horror quartet Different Seasons. (The other two novellas in the collection were “Apt Pupil,” adapted into a more horror-like and decidedly less acclaimed thriller in 1998; and “The Breathing Method,” which has yet to be make it to the movies.) Rob Reiner’s film version of Stand By Me, about a group of 12-year-olds on a journey to find a dead body allegedly seen in a forest, was released shortly before King’s book It, and in some ways it feels like a purer version of that horror epic: The bittersweet coming-of-age material, minus the rococo nightmare fuel (and some of that novel’s more questionable indulgences, largely excised from the two-part film). That feels particularly true of the film versions, because while the recent It duology has some great moments, particularly in its first part, it doesn’t quite capture the sheer visceral terror of the book, while managing to faithfully reproduce its sprawl. Stand By Me, on the other hand, is an object lesson in how sometimes a short story or novella is better material for expansion into a movie.
Though it wasn’t as big a hit at the box office in its initial release, The Shawshank Redemption takes that concept further, and became arguably the most popularly acclaimed King adaptation ever, a fixture of the IMDB top movies list as voted by users, a cable mainstay, and a seven-time Academy Award nominee. (It’s the most such honors for a King movie, though the only one to actually win an Oscar is Misery, for its Kathy Bates performance.) The precision of King’s characterization, the juxtaposition of his folksiness with the darker corners of life experiences, is well-captured and expanded upon by writer-director Frank Darabont.
The Life of Chuck seems poised to follow in those footsteps. It’s adapted from another book collecting four works that are longer than a typical short story but shorter than a full novel, the acclaimed collection If It Bleeds, and also showcases a less horrific side of King, with a bittersweetness about the passage of time. There are still some fantastical, even macabre elements to the full story, far moreso than the non-genre Stand By Me or Shawshank, but no real blood is shed.
The film, like the story, proceeds in reverse chronological order through three segments. In “Act III,” the world as we know it appears to be coming to an end, with natural disasters ravaging the country, the internet glitching out permanently, and other signs of the apocalypse as witnessed by an estranged couple played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan. They also keep seeing signs congratulations a mysterious “Chuck” figure who seems to be some sort of local accountant. In “Act II,” we catch a glimpse of Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) in middle age, spontaneously indulging his love of dance with a stranger; and in “Act I,” the longest segment, we learn more about Chuck’s childhood.
These threads do all tie together neatly – perhaps too neatly as the movie’s eerie intrigue in its apocalyptic section and heart-on-sleeve earnestness in its dance-sequence section gives way to an overly explanatory and drawn-out “first” act. Even before then, Flanagan’s fealty to King starts to clog the movie’s flow with reams of straight-from-the-text narration from Nick Offerman, indulging the worst tendencies of King’s folksy philosophizing. In the second section, where Offerman fills in details about Chuck, the woman he dances with, and the drumming busker who inspires their flight of fancy, the narration sounds like it could be imported straight from one of King’s horrible old Entertainment Weekly columns, rhapsodizing about “the beat” and “the groove” in full classic-rock euphoria when the music and the dancing should be speaking for itself. It’s not just a matter of sentimentality. The Shawshank Redemption is sentimental; The Life of Chuck is, in certain moments, embarrassing.
And in its distended final stretch, when the time comes to fill Chuck out from a hint of a person (something Hiddleston conveys quite gracefully) to a full-fledged character, the movie falters further, with a pileup of everyday backstory tragedies that weirdly echo the nastier yet, in its way, more heartfelt King adaptation The Monkey from just a few months ago. The further that The Life of Chuck tries to expand out to embrace the “multitudes” Walt Whitman wrote about (and are quoted here at length, though not at depth or breadth), the smaller and less inventive it feels. More than his spiritual predecessors Rob Reiner and Frank Darabont, Flanagan seems enraptured by the extratextual cult of King; he doesn’t seem remotely interested in translating the story from the page so much as making us sit down and listen as he reads it to us, reveling in all of the familiar King tropes. It’s both a touching act of fandom and a rejection of what makes the best adaptations soar.
This all renders The Life of Chuck more akin to Darabont’s adaptation of The Green Mile, which functioned as a sort of super-sized, self-conscious sequel to Shawshank: another prison movie with an unexpected friendship, expanded to a punishing three hours and infused with a lot of sketchy mysticism (and a particularly egregious use of one particular racial trope). In retrospect, that might have been the turning point in King adaptations. There have been plenty of good ones since, but over the past 25 years, King has only become more of a beloved institution, an elder statesman of fiction writing who, despite his blockbuster-level success and cultural ubiquity, attends more to the actual craft of writing than so many of his sales peers. He’s gone from providing popular and malleable source material to delivering holy texts, and The Life of Chuck feels all too aware of itself as One of Those adaptations – one that’s supposed to transcend its author’s horror-guy reputation and touch audiences around the world. Now that King is a de facto multi-studio franchise, that kind of transcendence may remain just out of reach.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.
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