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PARK CITY, Utah – When Christopher Reeve was in the hospital after the tragic horseback riding accident in 1995 that left him paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe on his own, his good friend Robin Williams paid him a visit to take him to the Laugh.
“I came in as a Russian proctologist, put on a glove and said, 'We have to examine this thing,'” Williams says in an archival interview in the moving and visually imaginative new documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story,” out on premiered Sunday morning at the Sundance Film Festival.
The two were roommates at Juilliard before Reeve became the world's biggest movie star at 24 as Superman, before Williams was Mork from “Mork & Mindy.” It was Williams who cheered up the distraught Reeves, who at the height of his pain whispered to his wife Dana, “Maybe we should let me go.” It was Williams and his second wife Marsha who bought the Reeve family a special retrofitted van to to get him to perform at the Oscars ten months after the accident. Williams joined the board of what later became the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation and became a disability advocate herself. At Reeve's funeral, Williams called Reeve his brother and said that Reeve was a solid rock to Williams “and I was chaos to him,” but Reeve loved it.
“I always felt like if Chris were still there, Robin would still be alive,” Glenn Close says in the film, in one of the moments that might take your breath away.
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At this premiere screening, sobs and sniffles constantly echoed through the hall. “I lost five pounds because of the tears,” said one male viewer, who had to repeatedly use the moments when the screen went black to discreetly wipe his face. The film by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui (“McQueen” and “Rising Phoenix” about the Paralympic movement) is not yet in distribution, but seems certain to find a buyer.
This year marks 20 years since Reeve died of an infection at age 52, and Matthew Reeve, his eldest son, told the audience that it was simply the right time to do something like this. They thought Bonhôte and Ettedgui could create something that felt more like a narrative, more like poetry – and turned over their archive of home videos. Reeve had three children. Two of them, Matthew and Alexandra, grew up largely in England after he split from his partner Gae Exton, a former modeling agent whom he never married. His youngest child, Will, was born after he met his wife Dana, an actress and singer who dedicated herself to caring for and caring for Christopher after the accident.
All three children give raw and vulnerable interviews, as does Exton; Dana died of lung cancer just 18 months after her husband. “From that moment on,” Will says in the film, “I was alone.”
Unlike “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” two of the film’s leads, Christopher and Dana, do not speak for themselves, so the filmmakers use narration from interviews as well as the audio of Christopher’s post-accident memoir, “Still Me .” Will also reads from his mother's diaries, which he does every year in March, the month of her birthday and also her death. “It’s nice to get a glimpse into what she went through during a really difficult time,” he told the audience.
This is not a traditional documentary, but in many ways a meditation on life, with a structure that jumps back and forth in time from Christopher's heady days as Superman to his final nine years in a wheelchair. Artistic flourishes are everywhere, like a computer-generated bronze statue of Reeve that cracks after the accident and starts sprouting what look like green shards of glass as his body deteriorates. But the film also deals with the controversy that arose in the disability community surrounding Reeve's push for a cure to get out of a chair. Because of this outcry, the foundation now has two branches: Today's Care and Tomorrow's Cure.
“I'm glad they expressed some of the backlash from the disability community because I feel that too, the cry of people saying, 'Love me for who I am and as I am.' “I won’t walk again,” said Stephani Victor, a four-time Paralympic medalist in alpine skiing who loved the film and was the only one in the audience in a wheelchair. She was moved to tears as she told the Reeve children how much their father meant to her; Just six months after Reeve's accident, she was in a car accident that cost her both legs, and friends had given her his memoirs as she recovered in the hospital. When she read it, she said, she realized her dream of becoming an athlete. She also met Williams several times when he stayed all day at the annual charity triathlon for the Challenged Athletes Foundation. “Robin didn’t just show up. He did every triathlon,” she said.
It was only after the accident, the film suggests, that Reeve truly evolved from the role of superhero to himself, as a parent and as the leader of a foundation that is now a lifeline for 300 million people with disabilities. “For us, it’s really a film that is, at its core, about family and love,” Bonhôte said.
Outside the theater, the Reeves enjoyed thinking about what Williams and her father meant to each other. “Their friendship was a wonderful thing,” Will said. “They complemented each other so well, and they were two young kids with a passion for their craft who found each other, then had great success and stayed true to who they were.”
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