Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story – The BRWC Review. By Simon Thompson.

When you think of the perfect castings in movie history, the usual suspects spring to mind: Sean Connery as James Bond; Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones; Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta; Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly;  Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden; Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade etc. For me that accolade will always belong to the absolute genius who decided to cast a lanky, unknown, 25 year old straight out of drama school, named Christopher Reeve as one of the most recognisable and important comic book characters of all time : Superman. 

Reeve absolutely embodies that character for me, ever since I saw his movies being regularly replayed on tv during my childhood. However before watching Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s excellent documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, I realised that I knew very little about Christopher Reeve the human being, aside from the tragic accident that left him paralysed from the neck down during the last nine years of his life. 

Ettedgui’s and Bonhôte’s documentary rectified this and then some, as through voiceovers by Reeve himself, spliced together with archive footage of his life as well as interviews from his family and friends, you leave the cinema with as comprehensive a portrait of an inspirational human being as you’re ever likely to find. 

Before watching the movie I assumed that the narrative was going to start with Reeve’s early life and then move to his accident in the 1990s chronologically, instead, however the audience is confronted with the accident right away. While Reeve is in coma, we are treated to his fears, anxieties, and suicidal thoughts in a very intimate way, as well as the intrusive media circus which accompanied his hospital stay that his poor family where stuck having to bat away- on top of everything else. 

From this point on we flip to his early life, growing up the son of divorced parents and struggling to please his extremely intellectual, competitive, almost renaissance man of a  father named Franklin which led him to discovering his love of acting as a form of solace. From here the action switches to his attending Julliard, then winning the part of Superman bringing him worldwide international fame and recognition, his attempt to try and break away from the Superman image to little success, his life as a family man later on, and finally his tireless work as a disability rights activist helping to raise funding for spinal cord injury research, amongst other causes. 

Through putting his life in focus and interviewing his longtime partner Gae Exton, his children Will, Alexandra, and Matthew, and friends such as Glenn Close, John Kerry, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jeff Daniels, the audience is given a portrait of Reeve in totality allowing us to get a sense of the legacy he left both artistically and socially through his charity the Christopher Reeve Foundation. 

If you’re into either documentaries or Superman or are looking to be inspired in any way, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is the perfect movie for you. 

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