‘The Life Of Chuck,’ Sappy Stephen King Adaptation, Wins TIFF’s Grand Prize

No longer quite the People’s Festival, with tickets going as high as $90 before dynamic pricing and resale markets ratchet them even higher, The Toronto International Film Festival awarded their People’s Choice Awards over the weekend. And the big winner is a feel-good Stephen King adaptation with no distributor.

The Life of Chuck, written and directed by Mike Flanagan, and based on King’s novella, uses a reverse three-act chronological structure to explore the “I contain multitudes” meaning of life through a mild-mannered accountant who loves to dance (Tom Hiddleston). It’s an odd, corny, earnest story, tinged with sci-fi elements and end-times climate-change anxiety. It also hinges on a Victorian house’s haunted cupola—as well as Hiddleston’s credible hoofing technique. Not so credible: Mark Hamill as a wide-eyed alte kaker whose touching role as Chuck’s zayde is hobbled by his chewy oy-vey cadence. Audiences lapped up the whole mishegoss, apparently, so expect this maudlin tear-jerker to land a healthy distribution deal that might even get it into the Oscar race before the end of the year.

Another absurdly crowd-pleasing slice of melodrama came in the far juicier Vatican backstabber Conclave, a deliciously paranoid look at the machinations behind the selection of a new pope. Edward Berger, acclaimed for his stolid prestige remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, directs this overheated adaptation of Robert Harris’ 2016 speculative novel starring Ralph Fiennes as the beleaguered manager of a fraught group that includes Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow. Expect hushed whispers, tense confrontations, and startling revelations among the sequestered cardinals, a petulantly pious bunch with sumptuous tailoring and the occasional vape. Focus is planning an October release.

Far more riveting was The Order, Justin Kurzel’s white-knuckled early-’80s crime thriller based on the true story of White Supremacists in the Pacific Northwest. Jude Law plays an FBI agent hell-bent on stopping a virulent new subset of the White Power movement that has embraced bank robberies as its fastest way to bankroll a private militia and launch an insurrection against the U.S. government.  Vertical holds U.S. rights and will be rolling out this queasily relevant film in December.

Although big, brassy Hollywood films were lacking, the legacy studios did bring a pair of musical biopics that were as stylistically delightful as they were thematically bland. Universal’s adorable Piece by Piece, technically a documentary from Oscar-winner Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom), reimagines Pharrell Williams’ life as a big-budget animated Lego movie. Does it work? Frankly, it’s hard to imagine another way to show how the wunderkind music producer and musician experiences life: as a giant, candy-colored sandbox fantasia where every new event or challenge is a chance to play. “There’s not a drip of street in him,” says Lego minifigure Jay-Z. Everyone else, by the way, is also a Lego minifigure: Missy Elliot, Timbaland, Gwen Stefani—even Snoop Dogg, who of course also appears as a Lego minifigure Doberman. Far from an insightful study of how or why Pharrell really works—his world-famous beats just mysteriously appear as glowing blocks—Piece by Piece is still an irresistibly entertaining joyride.

The bigger gamble is Paramount’s grand, glitzy, gaudy popstar paean Better Man, from director Michael Gracey. His last fiction film, 2017’s P.T. Barnum reverie The Greatest Showman, became an unlikely worldwide hit. And this latest, his eccentric take on the music career of sassy bad-boy Brit Robbie Williams—first a member of boy-band Take That before getting kicked out and becoming a wildly successful solo artist—might even be more of a gamble. Instead of casting a charismatic wanker to play the charismatic wanker, he created a CGI monkey. That’s right: imagine Caesar from the reboot of Planet of the Apes, but instead of launching a revolution against humanity he decides to be on Top of the Pops. For over two hours, we follow the rags-to-riches story of a walking, talking, singing, dancing simian from a hardscrabble life in Central England to international stardom. It’s bizarre and hilarious—an inspired way to express alienation and singularity, as well as the primal urges driving Williams’ unsophisticated take on life.

Arguably the warmest welcome at TIFF was reserved for Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s love letter to native Torontonian Lorne Michaels and his near-quixotic mission to pull of the debut episode of Saturday Night Live on October 11, 1975. Structured to seem like a minute-by-minute account of the 90 minutes before the show went on air, Saturday Night stretches time like taffy, making room for facts, fictions, legends, apocryphal moments, gossip and just-go-with-it laughs. The film’s ensemble cast of relative unknowns pull off the greatest trick: making us believe that we’re really watching the actual Not Ready for Prime Time Players all on the cusp of a stardom that even they couldn’t believe possible. It’s an adoring ode to a lost time, and an apposite salute to the cultural institution that this fall will be celebrating its 50^th season on television.