I mentioned in my mini-review on Insta (@Flaw_In_The_Iris) that I was still digesting this film and its themes, but I think I’ve got my head around it. Filmmaker Mike Flanagan adapts his third Stephen King story after Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep, and The Life Of Chuck lies somewhere between the supernatural horror that King built his career on and the more slice-of-life dramas like Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption. It tells the story of an accountant in three chapters in reverse order, with Chapter Three barely involving Chuck as a character. How’s that? I hear you ask. It mostly concerns a recently divorced couple — Chiwetel Ejiofor reminding us of his incredible warmth on screen, and Karen Gillan freeing herself from the MCU — dealing with the sudden, if somewhat suburban and quiet, end of the world.
As we go back in time the whys of the story slowly start to make sense, and we discover Chuck (played at different ages by Benjamin Pajak, Jacob Tremblay, and Tom Hiddleston) is a terrific dancer. I like the echoes of 1980s Amblin entertainments in the heartfelt vibe of this movie as well as the distinct nods to Back To The Future and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — welcome back, Mia Sara. I liked the rest of the cast including Mark Hamill, Q’orianka Kilcher, David Dastmalchian, and Carl Lumbly, and I appreciate the overarching theme of enjoying little moments of pleasure in life, even if you don’t understand them, because you never know when all of that could be taken away from you.
Was not crazy about the Nick Offerman voiceover, which felt like a heavy-handed crutch — pushing the script to tell more than show, but the conclusion nicely left some questions unanswered, a daring amount of ambiguity for a movie like this.
Saturday Night is one of the more high profile pictures at this year’s TIFF, directed by Jason Reitman and recreating the chaos that was the first episode of Saturday Night Live back in October 1975. The script was born out of a lot of research — so Reitman explained in his introduction. He also talked about the way Jon Batiste created the score, with his band playing live over edited rushes at the end of each day — Batiste also plays Billy Preston in the movie. All of that was helpful, but I would’ve liked to have heard more about the editing — this is a highly caffeinated style of picture, capturing the chaos of a live sketch show where so much seemed to be left open to chance and talented improv artists. Producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) is the ostensible star of the film as he struggles to corral his talent, manage his crew, satisfy the censors, and keep the network brass from rerunning an episode of Johnny Carson rather than take a chance on this untested group of counterculture comedians.
The key SNL cast is: Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, Kim Matula as Jane Curtin, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman, and Matt Wood as John Belushi. Amongst the other cast we’ve got Matthew Rhys, terrific as George Carlin, JK Simmons as the deeply obnoxious Milton Berle, who apparently liked to talk about the size of his johnson, Kaia Gerber, Willem Dafoe, Rachel Sennott, Cooper Hoffman, Robert Wuhl, Finn Wolfhard, and Nicholas Braun as both Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman. They’re all pretty great inhabiting these folks, many of whom an entirely familiar from having been on TV and in the movies for up to 50 years. The film is mostly funny — though the best lines are lifted right off the original SNL shows. This overstuffed cast means it’s sometimes too frenetic for its own good — it might’ve been sharper if it had focussed on just Michaels and his work with the on-camera personalities.
In my final #TIFF24 screening, I went to Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, a Canadian comedy that imagines Winnipeg if it was possessed by the spirit of Tehran circa 1982 — all the signs are in Persian, even Tim Horton’s, the entire population (including actor/director Rankin) are Persian speakers and live in a nightmare version of the city with a lot overpasses, brutalist architecture, and dirty snow. The audience I watched it with were all over the surreal gags and a vision of a city transformed. You could call it a more drab take on Wes Anderson in its horizontal framing and deadpan line deliveries. For me the visual austerity was so weirdly dystopic and oppressive I found it a bit hard to laugh at its peculiar undercurrent of humour, and even at a concise 90 minutes its whimsy lost some charm, but it’s not hard to recognize the filmmaker has a wildly original approach.
