Sunday, April 12, 2020

Superman Returns (Warner Bros., Legendary Pictures, Peters Entertainment, 2006)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Thursday night Charles and I watched the 2006 film Superman Returns, of which I’d bought a DVD two months ago at the Mission Hills library sale (remember library sales? Remember libraries?), only it wouldn’t play and I ended up getting curious enough about this movie that I bought a three-disc Blu-Ray package also containing the 1978 Superman: The Movie (directed by Richard Donner and starring Christopher Reeve) and a reconstruction of the 1980 Superman II directed by Donner and featuring additional footage for Marlon Brando, who played Superman’s father Jor-El in the original film and shot enough material to continue the part in the sequel — only he ended up squabbling with producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind over his percentage deal and refused to allow his footage to be used in Superman II (he was replaced by additional footage with the actress playing Superman’s mother — according to this version of the Superman mythos, both his parents continued to nag him even from beyond the grave, and during Superman II I joked to Charles, “He’s probably thinking, ‘I wonder if Thor had to put up with this from Odin’”). Warner Bros., which distributed the first Superman feature, later bought the rights both to the film series and to Superman the character by acquiring his comic-book publisher, D.C., and they continued the series through two more films with Reeve before laying it to rest after the disappointing grosses of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. In 2006 Warners decided to reboot the Superman franchise and hired director Bryan Singer away from the X-Men series at Marvel to direct the new film and co-write it with Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris. It seems a little odd to be watching this film now that both Singer and Kevin Spacey, who appears in it as Lex Luthor, have fallen afoul of the #MeToo sex police (they’re both Gay men who have been accused of doing physically abusive things to young men, including underage boys, and in line with the witch-hunt the #MeToo movement has become their careers have been trashed and they’ve almost literally been “unpersonned” in Hollywood — they do not exist, they never existed — even though the allegations against them are just that, unproven allegations, in a neo-McCarthyite climate of fear in which rumor and innuendo can be enough to destroy a career) — but that’s not the problem with Superman Returns. The real problem is that it’s boring.

Superman Returns was pretty clearly a sequel to the first two Superman movies in the four-film sequence with Christopher Reeve, but the writers and actors simply aren’t as good. The first two Reeve Superman films were ostensibly based on a story by Mario Puzo, whose name was big box-office following the success of his book The Godfather and the first two films based on it, and though reportedly virtually nothing Puzo wrote ended up in the finished film, the script that finally got shot was the work of David Newman, who with his writing partner Robert Benton had come up with the superb fusion of comedy and crime drama of the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde. Newman and Benton both got credit for the first Reeve Superman, along with Newman’s wife Leslie, whom he brought on board because he felt he needed a woman to write for Lois Lane. For Superman II the only credited writers were Puzo and both Newmans, but they were still a damned sight better at evoking the feeling of a 1930’s screwball comedy centered around a newspaper mixed with a superhero mythos that was, after all, first created in 1938, when the screwball comedies were at their most popular. Messrs. Singer, Dougherty and Harris tried to evoke a similar mood, but they weren’t as good writers as the Newmans and Benton, and they didn’t have a terribly compelling cast either. After Keanu Reeves (who would have been physically wrong for the part just as the current Superman, Henry Cavill, is, and for the same reasons: he’s too small and wiry to match the tall, robust figure in the comics Jerry Siegel wrote and Joe Shuster drew) bailed on the role — he never said why, though the rumor at the time was that he’d noted the tragic fates of his near-namesakes who’d previously played the Superpart (George Reeves dead in 1959 in an apparent suicide, though his story is sufficiently mysterious he was the subject of a fascinating biopic, Hollywoodland, directed by Allen Coulter and starring Ben Affleck in one of his very best performances as Reeves — and Christopher Reeve permanently crippled in a horseback-riding accident and forced to spend the last decade of his life in a wheelchair) — the producers got Brandon Routh. 

One gets the impression they discovered Routh in a Christopher Reeve look-alike contest, and as Clark Kent he’s got the doofus part right but he doesn’t quite catch Reeve’s humanity — the contrast between the beautifully written, acted and staged sequence in which Reeve took Margot Kidder as Lois for a joyride in the first Superman movie and the dull, inept rehash of the same sequence in Superman Returns says all you need to know about the contrast between the films and why the 1978 Superman remains a joy while Superman Returns is a dreary bore. It also doesn’t help that Kate Bosworth, a talented actress in the right part (like Beyond the Sea, the Bobby Darin biopic directed by and starring Kevin Spacey), just doesn’t sparkle like Kidder did as Lois Lane (and as Noel Neill[1], who played her in the first live-action Superman films — the Columbia serials from 1948 and 1951 — and again in all but the first two seasons of the George Reeves TV series, did before her). And while I admire Kevin Spacey for being willing to shave his head to resemble the famously bald Lex Luthor in the comics, he’s simply not as good an actor as Gene Hackman, whose Luthor in the first two Reeve films commanded the screen even though Hackman refused to shave his head and therefore the costume and makeup departments had to redo his hair to make it look like he was wearing an ill-fitting wig. (I still think, though, that the best Lex Luthor on screen was Lyle Talbot, who played him in the 1951 Columbia serial Atom-Man vs. Superman, with Kirk Alyn as the best-ever Superman.) Likewise Parker Posey as Luthor’s dumb girlfriend (this time called “Kitty Kowalski” instead of “Eve Teschmacher”) is O.K. but hardly in the same league as Valerie Perrine, who was able to bring some depths into this silly stereotype of a character. 

Frank Langella is largely wasted as the Daily Planet’s irascible editor, Perry White (what’s a nice bad guy who played Dracula doing in a place like this?) and James Marsden is a walking, talking cliché as Richard White, Perry’s nephew, head of the Daily Planet’s international bureau and Superman’s rival for Lois’s affections. We’re supposed to believe that Richard White and Lois Lane have been “living together” for seven years and have even had a child together, but so far they’ve declined to get married — and if there was any attempt by David and Leslie Newman to set up a His Girl Friday-style conflict with Lois torn between the exciting superhero and the dull normal guy who could give her an ordinary life, they don’t bother to do more than hint at it. (If Lois’s alternate boyfriend had come from outside journalism and had wanted her to retire and be a stay-at-home wife and mother, the parallel would have been closer and more entertaining.) What’s more, when Luthor kidnaps both Lois and her son Jason (Tristan Lake Leabu, making his movie debut) and he exposes Jason to Kryptonite, just when we’re thinking, “Oh, no, they’re not going to have Jason be Superman’s child,” he gets faint from being around Kryptonite and therefore it’s established that he is Superman’s child, presumably conceived in that hot night Superman gave Lois her Superfuck in the Fortress of Solitude in Superman II. We’re also told that Superman was absent from Earth for five years visiting the remains of Krypton after Earth astronomers had finally discovered them, but we never see the ruins of Krypton or find out how Superman got there and back (compare to the next Superman reboot, Man of Steel from 2013, where the filmmakers got so fascinated by Krypton’s history, technology and culture the film was over an hour old before they finally destroyed Krypton and sent Superman home to earth) and I guess depicting the wreckage of Krypton was beyond even the major budget Warner Bros. had allocated to this film. 

And the movie ends with the much-hyped “Death of Superman” plot line that had already been a success in the comic books (the issue featuring the titular “Death” was the best-selling Superman comic ever published, and possibly the best-selling comic book ever), it means we get a ponderous exposition sequence at the end of a movie that has already had way too many ponderous exposition sequences that drops us the hint that Superman is alive after all and we can always expect a sequel. No sequel arrived, though, because while at least on paper this film turned a modest profit ($391,096,082 on an estimated production budget of $270,000,000), the combination of publicity costs and other expenses for releasing the film probably kept its balances low and made it a money-loser … so much so that when Warners decided to re-reboot the Superman franchise in 2013 they picked a whole new cast (including Henry Cavill, all wrong physically for Superman — too short, too wiry, not taller and more robust than most humans the way he was drawn in the comics). In Superman Returns the best performance was turned in by, of all people, Eva Marie Saint, playing Clark Kent’s foster mother Martha (and ironically reuniting her with Marlon Brando from On the Waterfront 52 years earlier!), one of those move-aside-young-whippersnappers-and-let-an-old-pro-show-you-how-it’s-done performances much the way Ellen Burstyn did in the Lifetime adaptation of V. C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic and Noel Neill, the original Lois Lane, did in a cameo appearance early on in Superman Returns, which otherwise remains a ponderous bore, with a director who was obviously more at home in the angst-ridden realms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (especially the X-Men wing of it, probably the most angst-ridden part of it!) than the relatively innocent you-know-who-the-good-guys-are-and-you-know-who-the-bad-guys-are realm of D.C. — 4/10/20 and 4/12/20



[1] — And who makes a cameo appearance in the opening scene of Superman Returns as Gertrude Vanderworth, a super-rich woman who disinherits her whole family on her deathbed and leaves her entire fortune to Lex Luthor.