SUPER/MAN: THE CHRISTOPHER REEVE STORY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 6

For my generation, Christopher Reeve is the ultimate superhero - the dreamy, earnest Superman who flew through the skies with Lois Lane. (Sidebar - people think we only got strong female characters now, but I grew up with Princess Leia and Lois Lane, both massively professionally capable and far from blonde Barbies. What a time to be a kid!)  So when Superman was thrown from a horse and paralysed it was shocking and tragic.  He appeared once again at the Oscars making a moving and stirring speech, and then - at least for me - disappeared from view until his death ten years later.  This accomplished new documentary, from directors  Peter Ettedgui (MCQUEEN) and Ian Bonhote, fills in those gaps.

The Christopher Reeve that emerges from this film is an earnest theatre kid who makes it to Juilliard and rooms with his lifelong best friend Robin Williams.  He gets the break to be Superman and off-broadway co-star William Hurt cautions him against it.  Reeve finds international fame but also feels trapped in a certain kind of role, and people's impossible expectations of him as a perfect hero.

In fact he was a complex and flawed man, as we are all flawed. His father did a number on him, raising him in a type of toxic masculinity of hyper-competitiveness and impossible to meet expectations. Reeve was also surrounded by broken marriages and had trouble committing. He met a British woman filming SUPERMAN and had two children with her but didn't marry her and left her to go back to a single life in New York. Five months later he met the woman who would be by his side when the accident happened - Dana - and would actually marry her and have another son.

It's testament to Christopher's family, including his first partner, that they all agree to appear in this film and speak with honesty and vulnerability of what those broken relationships did to them. His elder two children argue that he was more of a present parent after the accident when hyper-competitive athletics were off the table. It's also testament to all three parents that the children seem so close and supportive of each other. I had no idea that the younger son Will lost his mother very soon after losing his father, and his big half-brother really stepped in to provide support. All three were at the London Film Festival screening and it was a privilege to watch this deeply moving film in their presence.

And what of Christopher post-accident?  He launched a foundation and became an activist for scientific research. Some in the disabled community bristled at his search for a cure, and Dana corrected that balance by focussing on care and quality of life. Both seem utterly admirable in their energy and commitment and courage. I was equally moved by the support given by his closest friends, not least Robin Williams. And it utterly broke me when Glenn Close, interviewed extensively here, says she thinks that Robin would still be with us if Christopher had not died.

I would recommend this film to those who loved Superman as children and still feel a thrill when they hear that score. It gives so much depth and insight to the man behind the cape and the extraordinary family who rose to the challenge of his catastrophic accident. I cried, but I was also uplifted. He is still my Superman.

SUPER/MAN: THE CHRISTOPHER REEVE STORY has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated PG-13. It was released in the USA last month and will be released in the UK on November 1st.

THE COLOR PURPLE (1985)*****

In preparation for the remake of THE COLOR PURPLE I thought I would revisit the original screen adaptation. It was directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by Menno Meyjes and based on Alice Walker's iconic novel of black southern female misery.  At the time this must have seemed like rather an odd combination of director and writer for such material - two white men, known for their work in blockbuster action movies. Indeed, the race of the directorial choice attracted a lot of criticism, as well as Spielberg's coy depiction of its lesbian storyline.  I feel that both of these criticisms fail to consider the context of the time: the need to attract commercial backers and keep a PG-13 rating for the mass market. They also fail to acknowledge the opportunity to see so much black talent in front of and behind the lens - with stunning debut feature central performances from Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, as well as a masterful score from Quincy Jones.*  A more convincing criticism of both book and film is its depiction of black male sexual violence.  Added to this, one might criticise the racism of the film industry. While the film was nominated for eleven Oscars, it didn't win a single one. 

The book and film take place over the first half of the twentieth century in the rural South. Their protagonist is Celie - a black girl so oppressed that she is raped by her father and her incestuous children taken from her.  She is then given to another violent man as his wife, dudgeon and surrogate mother to his children.  The only love in Celie's life is her sister Nettie, but they are cruelly separated by her husband and she spends much of her life believing Nettie is dead.  The only friendship Celie has is with her stepdaughter-in-law Sophia, whose fierce temper and assertiveness are an inspiration and then a tragedy.  And the only lover Celie truly has is Shug, her husband's long-time mistress, who teaches Celie what real sexual pleasure can be.

The standard criticism of Spielberg films is that they are sentimental and gauche. There is sentiment here but it is all earned. Whoopi Goldberg's debut as Celie is so heartbreakingly sincere that one cannot help but glory in her small moments of happiness and love. I was similarly deeply moved by Shug (Margaret Avery), the stunning singer, in her final homecoming to her disapproving pastor father. And there is something quite haunting about Sophia's humbling, portrayed by an otherwise vivacious and scene-stealing Oprah Winfrey. 

There is so much else to admire in this film beyond the economic script and great performances. Allen Daviau's cinematographer portrays both the lush warmth of the South as well as the oppressive claustrophobia. There is both beauty and violence in this film. But for me, it's all about Whoopi Goldberg and Quincy's score. This is tremendously powerful film-making.

THE COLOR PURPLE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 154 minutes.  *I am curious to see how the new film - based on a musical adaptation of the book - will better the final "coming home" of Shug to a thrilling gospel score.) 

TILL - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 11

TILL is a handsome and earnest film that is beautifully produced, acted and lensed, but that feels so freighted by grief that it becomes almost hermetically sealed and strains at its two hour, ten minutes running time.  This is perhaps because we never know a time before grief. Even in the early scenes where Emmett Till (Jalyn Hill) and his mother (Danielle Deadwyler) are happily living in middle-class Chicago, she is on the verge of tears and paranoia that something is going to happen to her teenage son when he goes to Mississippi to visit his cousins.  The foreboding is so heavy and persistent it never lets daylight in on the family, and makes us wonder why on earth she sent him if she was that convinced her happy-go-lucky charming child was going to be met with racial violence. I am in no way blaming the character, to be clear, I am just saying that this is a film about grief from minute one. Maybe that's an accurate depiction of the black experience in 1955, or today for that matter, but it makes for a film that doesn't seem to progress. It's trapped in amber for its entire running time, and its characters are trapped with it, never evolving or progressing. Mamie Till-Mobley is a strong, weeping mother for the entire film.  Her family are supportive.  The activists and community who rally round her are fully formed and ready to spring into action.  They are all good, decent people. This is a film where the good are good and unchanging. The bad are bad and unchanging. Racism is unchanging.

So the conclusion I have come to is that this is not a feature film in the conventional sense that is dealing in the currency of plot and character development. Rather this is an event to which we bear witness. It is the literal open-casket viewing at a funeral. It must be viewed and judged in those terms, rather than as a conventional film, because it is so freighted in history that it rejects those terms.

We bear witness to the affluence of the post-war middle class black America of the northern cities.  We bear witness to the still insidious but more muted racism that pierces the affluence. We bear witness to black Americans moving out of the first class train carriages as they cross into the South. We bear witness to southern black America still picking cotton in the fields. We bear witness to Emmett Till's disfigured, mutilated body. We bear witness to a southern courtroom packed with white men in white shirts. We bear witness to the casual way in which the prosecution team dismisses Emmett Till's mum.

Bearing witness is of value, if a depressing reminder of the ages long struggle for civil rights, and this film provides a sombre historical lesson told with care and skill. 

TILL has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated PG-13.  It was released in the USA this weekend and will be released in the UK on January 23rd.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

Unsurprisingly, I did not have a good time watching this latest live action feature film in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise.  I came to it neutral, having enjoyed the cartoons as a kid, but finding the previous films dull and the so-called witticisms of the turtles grating.  This reboot does little to change that diagnosis.  The best that can be said about it is that after the "alien origins" scare, the story is faithful to its source materials.  The four turtles, named after Renaissance painters, are mutated into humanoid ninja-fighting vigilantes who live in the sewers with their jedi master mutated rat-father Splinter.  They have a female friend and accomplice called April O'Neil, who's a pretty journalist and an evil nemesis too. In this film, that's a corporate greedy bastard who wants to infect the city so that he can sell it a cure and become massively rich - and of course, that cure comes from stringing up the turtles and extracting their mutated genes.

I found the relentlessly-alecky banter from the turtles really grating and there's none of the charisma that, say, Corey Feldman brought to the original voice-cast. Megan Fox does her standard pretty girl in distress thing as April O'Neil and it's not so much her fault that the part is woefully underwritten. But even weirder, we have Will Arnett, fifteen years her senior, playing her goofy cameraman. There's meant to be sexual tension between the two but it just comes across as creepy and icky.  Finally, we've got Whoopi Goldberg as April's editor - utterly wasted.

The movie is made in a very workmanlike way. You've got all the martial arts scenes and special effects and loud music and the compulsory sprinkling of "kowabungas". There's nothing to get excited about and the final thirty minutes just descends into a loud and rather dull working through of gears.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES has a running time of 101 minutes and is rated PG-13.    The film is on global release.