Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story review - A doc that shows the super human story behind the Superman
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story - Review
20 years on from death, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story aims to show the superhuman story behind the Superman. The film opens by presenting Reeve as America’s hero, someone who as Superman fought for truth, justice and the American way, a hero for America who stood by the country’s values. The film presents him as the almighty, godly, omnipotent figure, always looking to engage in physical activity on his days off with his three young children. It shows what it was like to live with Superman.
However, pretty quickly the perfect life the film opens with comes crashing down. After a fall whilst horse riding, he became paralysed from the neck down, needing a ventilator to breathe. The film notes the miraculous endeavour to keep Reeve alive, resuscitating him twice in the surgery. With some smart, almost point-of-view shots, the film emphasises Reeve’s alienation with post-surgery life, as he confesses his sudden realisation he won’t be able to do anything.
The documentary pulls you through the emotions of the family, with video footage and family interviews being the two dominant sources on which the format is based. It is mostly a documentary about living with Superman in real life both before and after the accident. Going through his career in quick montages that overlay discussion of the discourse at the time. It is a rather simplistic and surface-level documentary that shows the power Reeve had as the Kryptonian. The film takes you through who Reeve was quite successfully. Showing him as a man of great determination. For instance, in Anna Karenina, he learned to ride horses despite being allergic. He is an intense figure who doesn’t do things by half. It does a good job of setting his personality for later on in the film after his injury, where he is determined to return to his past life.
However, where the film struggles is by fusing the two halves of his life. At one point the film joins together two sequences, a moment where Reeve commits to trying to walk again, and the flying sequence in Superman and his determination to achieve this feat. Whilst this should work, for me, the Superman, flying almost featurette felt as if it belonged to a DVD bonus feature and didn’t gel with his post-injury life. Despite at one point, Reeve saying that his life finally feels whole rather than two separate lives, the film makes the divide so apparent that the two separate journeys don’t merge succinctly.
The film for the first hour or so is also overly positive about Reeve as a figure. It presents him like Superman, someone who is all-loving, an ambitious, positive figure. Interviews from his family, as well as close friends such as Glenn Close, Robin Williams and Susan Sarandon only heighten this as they highlight all the positive qualities about him, and the struggle he went through as a child, showing his journey through adversity. However, it doesn’t delve much into the psyche of the man and the struggles of limelight or being a father to his children as well as this cinematic icon. He is a man who can spread himself from family to film to having fun with his friends and pursuing environmental and human rights issues.
Only towards the back end do you see another side to the man, someone who struggles to deal with committing to his first wife, an absent father and someone who had challenges after Superman, stuck within that single figure within the cultural identity of America. It states at one point that he was seen as a hero like Jesus, all good, and his struggle for Reeve to be like Superman. This was where the film was at its strongest because it adds a new layer of humanity to the figure and we can identify with his and his family’s struggles after the accident.
The film is a journey from his upbringing to his legacy, creating the Christopher Reeve Foundation (later including his second wife in the name) and how he influenced the evolution of science for spinal paralysis. Presenting two different tales of a super man. The film is a compelling, gripping, and emotional tale, however, at times it feels like one that was made as a commercial to raise awareness for the foundation. Using the nostalgia of Superman, by intercutting a floating statue of Superman in space with green sparks, as a way of connecting the audience to Reeve.