by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Christopher Reeve, Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Dana Reeve, Will Reeve, Barack Obama, Matthew Reeve
Intro:
… a loving and well-earned tribute to a real-life hero.
As Tarantino and Anthony Mackie astutely pointed out some years back, the modern monolith of superhero movies has shifted public perceptions of the characters being portrayed. Actors have always had to deal with being identified primarily by the roles they play, but nowadays, the role far exceeds the person playing it when it comes to perceptions among the viewing public and, of course, the studios marketing them.
Just from that standpoint, the decision to make a documentary highlighting the actor that not only remains the definitive Superman actor (just accept it, Snyder-bros), but arguably the person who had the greatest impact on superhero cinema at large, makes sense. Hell, considering cheap jokes about his paralysis are somehow still gaining traction, given Eminem’s bewildering decision to release Brand New Dance earlier this year, it’s downright needed right now.
Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui begin this tell-all story with the tragic accident that cost Christopher Reeve his legs, which was a smart move for two reasons. One, it stops the film’s trajectory from becoming a build-up to the moment everyone knows will happen and lets it meter out its emotional impact more evenly. And two, it allows Otto Burnham’s editing to align with Reeve’s recollections of his own mindstate after the accident, like an out-of-order slideshow of a life playing out before his eyes.
Shifting back and forth from his promising acting career and his later advocacy work (punctuated by some nicely surreal CGI work of a stone Man of Steel with growths of Kryptonite crystals across his body), the film essentially makes the case that he truly became Superman after he stopped portraying him on-screen. His emblematic performance took the world by storm, and rightly so, but it’s also undercut by Reeve admitting that he doesn’t see himself as a genuine hero in the same light. The words and images surrounding him tell a different story.
From his championing of disability rights to his focus on telling stories of the Other when he returned to filmmaking, to his forward-thinking approach to science and medicine, he is shown as a real Man of Tomorrow. A true Man of Steel. A human being with a body sculpted precisely to play a being beyond humanity yet irrevocably part of it, whose accident led him to take a stronger stance on topics like AIDS, disability, and the capacity of the human spirit. Much like his print counterpart (whose death in 1993 broke the U.S. news cycle as hard as Reeve’s paralysis did just a few years later), he responded to a brush with death by reclaiming his sense of self and fighting the good fight. With “Nothing scares me anymore” as his black suit.
The act of watching this is similar to the Mister Rogers doco Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, in that the cinematic confirmation that such a truly good person once breathed this world’s air is likely to cause ugly-crying. Doubly so for what is easily one of the biggest gut-punch lines to be found in any film this year (or possibly any year) courtesy of Glenn Close. To prevent the need for a replacement keyboard from excessive water damage, that quote will not be retyped here, but suffice to say, it will make you miss two legends even more than you thought you did already.
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is a loving and well-earned tribute to a real-life hero. It focuses primarily on the Man over his role as the Super (a bit like Superman II in its own way) and, in the process, shows that the impact he made away from the camera deserves more recognition than his merely being the iconic portrayal of one of fiction’s greatest paragons. There’s no S in Reeve, but there’s an S in Christopher, and that S stands for hope.
