THE LIFE OF CHUCK (no distrib): Although Mike Flanagan first gained attention as a director of low-budget feature films, he may be the first horror filmmaker to become an acknowledged master of the genre largely through episodic television, notably The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass and The Fall Of the House of Usher. (Even his highest-profile feature Doctor Sleep is considered to have reached its full quality with a “director’s cut” that runs 3 hours.) The greater length of his projects has allowed for a focus on character and thematic seriousness amidst the scares that often get put aside in the demands of a 100-minute horror movie. Those strengths come to the fore in The Life of Chuck, which marks his first major venture outside the genre, even though it reunites him with horror legend Stephen King, whose source material was the inspiration for both Doctor Sleep and the earlier Gerald’s Game. King’s short story is itself one of the author’s occasional departures from horror, and it’s difficult to describe without entering spoiler territory. Flanagan’s faithful script follows King by telling the story backwards. It starts in a near-future where the world is coming to an end, but it isn’t a thriller. Rather, it’s a gentle tale about a teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his ex-wife (Karen Gillan) making a connection before things cosmically wind up, unable to understand why even as the planet deteriorates, there are an endless number of ads all around them celebrating a seemingly obscure man named Chuck Krantz (Tom Hiddleston). The following chapters are about Chuck, and they gradually explain why the world is in the state we saw in Chapter 1. Although there’s ultimately a supernatural element to The Life of Chuck, it’s small (and frankly unnecessary). If anything, the surprising genre that comes to the fore is the musical, as the middle section is fired up by an ecstatic dance number for Chuck, a street drummer and a woman he’s never met before (Annalise Basso), and the final chapter explains Chuck’s relationship to dance. The Life of Chuck allows Flanagan to exercise muscles we haven’t seen from him before, especially in that production number midway through, which has been exuberantly choreographed (by Mandy Moore), shot (by Eben Bolter) and edited (by Flanagan himself) to encompass the history of Hollywood dance sequences. The cast, which includes Mark Hamill as Chuck’s grandfather, is excellent throughout, and the film is touching and mysterious. It’s a fine, unexpected addition to Flanagan’s growing canon.
WE LIVE IN TIME (A24 – October 11): A fairly ordinary, even banal, story that doesn’t gain depth by being told via spliced timelines. John Crowley’s film is from a script by Nick Payne, best known for his multiverse romance play “Constellations.” Here, though, the action all takes place on a single Earth. The pieces are pretty much all in the trailer: chef Almut (Florence Pugh) and junior executive Tobias (Andrew Garfield) meet cute when she hits him with her car, they have a daughter together, and they know happiness until she’s diagnosed with cancer. Crowley and Payne jazz this up by intercutting between the opening stage of their romance, the time of Almut’s pregnancy, and the period after her diagnosis. The intention must have been for these reflect back on each other in an insightful way, and for a larger statement to be made about life and time, but the results aren’t evident. Rather, they fracture the flow of emotion, which is a particular problem in the portions about Almut’s illness, where the chronicled events are increasingly far-fetched. That doesn’t make We Live In Time a waste. Pugh and Garfield are luminous actors, and they make a charismatic onscreen couple, while Crowley delivers a slick package, with warm cinematography by Stuart Bentley and an effective score by Bryce Dessner. It’s a high-class soap, but despite all the structural effort, that’s ultimately all it is.
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