The Life of Chuck Parent Guide

With the world crumbling – wildfires in the Midwest, floods in Florida, California sloughing dramatically into the Pacific, and worst of all, the internet falling apart – it’s hard to focus on any one thing. But all teacher Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) sees are the ads thanking somebody named Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) for “39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!” Even when nothing else will show up on the TV but the emergency broadcast standby static, and the power is out to everything, somehow “Thanks, Chuck!” is everywhere. But nobody in town has ever heard of the man, and besides, he barely looks 39 on the poster. How could he have worked anywhere for that amount of time?

Flash back nine months, though, and you could see Chuck dancing in the street, working his job, living his life in a normal world. How did it all go so wrong so fast? What happened to Chuck?

This film is a curveball for those of you who think you know what to expect from Stephen King, the King of Horror himself, and Mike Flanagan, the maniac behind a number of bloodcurdling Netflix series and, of course, the adaptation of King’s own Doctor Sleep. This is a melancholy-yet-optimistic little supernatural drama, presented in reverse order, and without gore of any kind. Think more The Green Mile than The Shining.

I tend to get whiny when people start playing with the timeline in stories – they almost always make more sense in chronological order – but I’ll give it a rest this time. The story makes sense, has impact, and works as edited. I suspect that’s mostly because each of the three clearly defined acts has a tidy trajectory of its own, and the sum of the stories is less dependent on the order in which they occurred. I also tend to be a real grouse about Stephen King adaptations – what can I say? I love so many of his books, and so many of them have been injured in the transition to celluloid. Mike Flanagan seems to be one of few directors who can wrangle a Stephen King tale onto the screen, and I’m grateful for it.

The Life of Chuck earned a Restricted rating, almost entirely due to the fifteen sexual expletives in the script. There’s also a good deal of drinking and smoking – one of the characters has an alcohol addiction – but just about every other type of negative content we flag only comes up in conversation. All things considered, this film could be suitable for mature older teens.

If I’m honest, the further I got into the film, the more I enjoyed the reversed chronology. Apart from the fact that it gives plenty of opportunities for Nick Offerman to read some thoughtful narration, knowing the ending can help you focus on what’s actually happening right now. And so, seats against the current, we can be borne back into the past.