‘You’ve got me?” splutters Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) in the 1978 Superman: The Movie, after her caped saviour (Christopher Reeve) scoops her up in his arms as she plunges from a skyscraper. “Who’s got you?”
It’s a question answered by the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. When Reeve was paralysed from the neck down after a fall while horse-riding in 1995, it necessitated a cultural reckoning with illusory images of strength and infallibility. On the day of the accident, Reeve flatlined twice; doctors estimated that his chances of living until the evening were 50/50. Not only did he survive but he went on to be an inspiring bipartisan campaigner in the areas of spinal injury and stem cell research. Behind the scenes, though, it was his family and friends who scooped him up in their arms: his friend and fellow Juilliard student Robin Williams, as well as Reeve’s three children and his wife Dana, whom he met in 1987 just as the Superman series was fizzling out after a fourth instalment filmed partly in Milton Keynes.
Super/Man moves back and forth between events before and after the accident, so that different varieties of pain are spread throughout the movie. Reeve’s early life, for instance, was dominated by attempts to please his steely, unimpressionable father, who only cracked out the champagne to mark his son’s big break because he mistakenly believed he had been cast in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman.
Not that Reeve was a perfect parent either. There is a bittersweet edge to his children’s admission that the accident made him a necessarily more present father, no longer able to vanish on skiing trips or movie jobs. Scenes from his films, including a 1998 remake of Rear Window, are used judiciously. There is the lingering poignancy and strangeness, too, of Reeve’s surprise appearance as a presenter at the Oscars just 10 months after his accident, with an auditorium of moist-eyed A-listers doing what Reeve himself no longer could – leaping to their feet in celebration.
Though the interviews with the Reeve children are poignant and insightful, directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui show no signs of trusting their material. There are cod-mythic cutaways to a statue of Reeve suspended in a void and encrusted with kryptonite crystals. Interesting points go unexplored, such as Reeve’s tendency to go for gay material whenever he wanted to prove his authenticity, whether playing Jeff Daniels’s lover on stage in Fifth of July, making a tongue sandwich with Michael Caine in Deathtrap or directing the Aids drama In the Gloaming two years after his accident. There are clear misjudgments, too, such as including Glenn Close’s batshit assertion that Robin Williams might still be alive today had Reeve lived. More than mildly insulting to Williams’s own family, that.
Nothing, though, is as unforgivable as Ilan Eshkeri’s unsubtle score, which soars and swoops like Superman himself, seeping into every corner of the film lest we forget to be uplifted and inspired at all times. Call it musical kryptonite.