Eleven days after Christopher Reeve shattered his top two vertebrae in a horseback riding accident that nearly killed him, Dana Reeve threw a party for their son.
The timing was terrible. But a beloved little boy was turning three – and a celebration was in order.
The party took place in a small lounge in the intensive care unit, filmed by a friend to share later at Christopher’s bedside. There is cake and a clown and Will Reeve, joyfully zipping back and forth among a sea of adults squeezed onto hospital couches.
Midway through the makeshift festivities, the camera lingers briefly on Matthew Reeve and Alexandra Reeve. They are 15 and 11 years old, and in between the bright smiles they beam toward their brother, their faces grow taut, their bodies still. Since the accident, they'd watched their father fight off pneumonia and survive a risky surgery to reattach his skull to his spine. They'd reached for his hand past a tangle of tubes connecting him to a ventilator keeping him alive. They understood that they might lose him.
But on this day, for this little boy, they keep their pain in check. The scene is as wrenching as it is beautiful, a glimpse of a family working hard to hold each other up.
The deeply private moment is one of many threaded throughout “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story,” a new film that not only pays tribute to Reeve’s extraordinary life, but the love that surrounded him.
Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui use a trove of never-before-seen home movies and archival materials shared for the first time by the Reeve children to depict a decidedly complicated man. Scenes zigzag back and forth across the whole of Christopher’s life, exploring everything from his difficult relationship with his father and the intense stardom that came with “Superman” to the despair that gripped him in the days after the accident. Narrated in large part by Reeve himself with the recorded audio from his autobiography, “Still Me,” the overall effect is not only intimate, but propulsive.
“Alexandra, Will, and I laid down this challenge in our very first conversation to not make it a film of two halves, a ‘before and after’ the accident,” Matthew says. “Our father’s story was much more interesting than that. And Ian and Peter found the emotional and thematic tissue that connects either side of his accident, and they cross that bridge and go back and forth really elegantly. It’s brilliant.”
The film, arriving 20 years after Christopher’s death, challenges its audience to better understand the complex ambitions that shaped him, not only in his work as an actor, but as an athlete and advocate and father. Here, Christopher’s triumphs and struggles – including his absence from Matthew and Alexandra’s early life, his frustrations with the movie that defined him, and his at-times blinkered drive to transform spinal cord injury research – are given equal weight. And that, says Matthew, is the point.
“We wanted whoever made this to create a 360-degree portrait of a human who was incredible and flawed, who was heroic and brave, who had fears and worries,” he says.
To that end, the Reeves not only shared their family archives with the filmmakers, they ceded control of the narrative and sat for deeply personal interviews.
“We knew if we wanted it to be good, and for the audience to respond to it, we had to share it all,” Matthew says. “We had to share ourselves and say the things we hadn't said publicly. We had to tell the stories that were just ours.”
Some of the resulting moments in the film – from Will describing how he learned of his mother’s death to Matthew talking about the last time he saw Christopher on his feet – are steeped in sadness. But others, including Will’s birthday party at the hospital, conjure a family’s determination to not cede their lives to despair.
“It was a terrifying time, and we knew what was at stake,” Alexandra says. “But at the same time, we saw what it was to try and create joy, to be together as a family. And I think that will resonate for a lot of people.”