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The Man of Steel’s life-changing accident – and the relationships that saved him – are the focus of this gut-punch of a documentary
4/5
One inch to the left, and the neck injury Christopher Reeve sustained when he fell off his horse in May 1995 would have killed him instantly. One inch to the right, and it would have been an embarrassing sprain, no more. The way his spinal cord was damaged, he was left with a tiny chance of ever moving another muscle from the neck down.
While this former Man of Steel, globally beloved as Superman, would fight with every nerve to beat that prognosis, denying it in tiny but meaningful ways, he would not succeed in walking again – let alone flying.
Astutely judged for the most part, and reflective on what Reeve meant to people in all phases of his life, the British documentary Super/Man is an emotional rollercoaster with some undeniably walloping moments. The relationships that quite literally saved Reeve come to the fore.
He awoke to his trapped state terrified, and unsure of an onward path. “Maybe you should let me go,” he told his wife Dana. “You are still you,” she replied, “and I love you”. It’s not just these words that convinced him to go on, but the directness of her gaze as she delivered them, without a fumble.
Reeve’s three children are the film’s most giving and open talking heads, though the likes of Susan Sarandon, John Kerry, Jeff Daniels and Whoopi Goldberg have much to add. His youngest son Will was only three when the accident happened. The others, Matt and Alexandra, were 15 and 11 respectively. Reeve had failed the older two in one respect: after his own parents’ bitter divorce, he vowed never to raise children into a broken home. While he never married their mother, Gae Exton, she took their separation in 1987 hard, and breaks down here at the memory.
Dipping back into Reeve’s prime allows the film a tender scope, while etching a career he always wished had got beyond a first act. Reeve’s wonderful elan as Superman, and determination to treat the role seriously, are well captured – is it possible to imagine a person acting the feat of flying more committedly? We grasp his disappointment, too, that for a wide swathe of the public, he was always and only Superman.
The bravery of his later public appearances, including a surprise guest spot at the Oscars in March 1996, came from his desire to break taboos around disability and campaign for more funding into spinal research injury. A famous/infamous TV commercial in 2000, which used computer imaging to show Reeve seemingly walking again, was deeply contentious. The late advocate Brooke Ellison explains how many in her community reject the whole notion of “cure”, a point Reeve took on board in diverting many of his efforts into improved quality of life.
The film pushes to an exit: a climactic montage leaves itself with too steep a climb, to lift us out of double tragedy after the consecutive deaths of both Will’s parents in 2004 and 2006. The music becomes an inspirational wash of strings that might give us pause. But almost no one could remain unmoved, a little earlier, by the devotion and grief of Reeve’s best friend, his old Juilliard roommate Robin Williams, whose funeral tribute, even in glimpses, is devastating. Glenn Close firmly believes that if Reeve was still alive, Williams would be, too.
Screening as part of the London Film Festival and in cinemas from November 1
Recommended
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4/5
English