Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story

While Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui's documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story recounts Reeve's journey with appropriate tenderness, it isn't a hagiography. It consistently reminds audiences that this was a real human being, and not actually a savior from another star.

As much as it’s a movie about one man’s struggle, it’s a family drama too, and the way his paralysis shifts their dynamic over the years is enrapturing to watch.

While Super/Man touches upon the role, its impact on Reeve’s career and personal life, the documentary is more of a touching ode to the complicated, charming man behind the cape, and the perseverance he showed following his accident.

Instead of treating the star’s life chronologically, they move between a consideration of his career and his spinal injury advocacy work in the wake of the devastating 1995 horse-riding accident that left him paralysed from the neck down. The result has the engaging feel of a dialogue between the pre- and post-accident Reeve and his family as his views and his life shifted as a consequence.

Super/Man should introduce many people, young and older, to a fine actor’s work and, more importantly, to what Reeve accomplished for himself and so many others in the life he was dealt.

Super/Man is a weeper, to be sure, for the reminder it brings to fans that this Man of Steel was only flesh and blood.

Though the interviews with the Reeve children are poignant and insightful, directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui show no signs of trusting their material.

Of the documentaries seen this year, this is the one that will leave an indelible mark. The story behind the actor who played the last son of Krypton and would become a hero both on and off the stage, in more ways than one. To watch it while you sing My Hero, by Foo Fighters.

It's difficult to encapsulate person's entire life, but Peter Ettedgui and Ian Bonote do an appropriately heartfelt and consistent telling of Reeve's journey from Juliard through Superman '78 and into his accident and later years. Wish they had spent a little more time on his career in the eighties aside from the Superman franchise; there were some gems that should get more love.

Pretty good documentary. Emotional and truthful. The documentary is more focus on his accident, with the impact it had. You also get his career context, but not in every details, in the form of flashbacks. And by the side also the in and out of his family history and implications. I give it a 82%. I think it also does a good job at understanding paralyzed peoples.

For many people, Reeve is known primarily as an actor and activist. What Super/Man tells us is that while those things were important to Reeve, what mattered most of all was his family. Recommended. detroitcineaste

BUENA HISTORIA ES UNA DE LA MEJOREs muy recomendable para ver si tienes Curiosida de ver una buena película