Starring Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci. Directed by Harry Macqueen.
Supernova is the kind of film that reminds you what British cinema can be when it’s at it’s best. At its core, this is a human drama that tells you something important about the human condition.
The story follows pianist Sam (Colin Firth) and novelist Tusker (Stanley Tucci) as they head out in their camper-van up England to attend a concert Sam is performing, all while Tusker deals with his ongoing early onset Dementia.
Two of Hollywood’s most adored men, going in the way to garner more goodwill is if they had a threeway with Tom Hanks and adopted Jacob Tremblay along the way. Firth has such a natural talent for playing a somewhat downbeat person that one look at him sighing and you know everything about him. While Tucci, even in his worst films, is both engaging and magnetic. Here, with a good role and a fantastic scene partner to match, he is in his element.
Writer-Director Harry Macqueen manages to get the most from the human drama; it’s about love, that just happens to be between two middle-aged men. The bickering in his script is nicely played; not as the drama of two screaming queens calling each other bitches, but as a genuine couple, disagreeing on small things, while not speaking about the big things, so that they spare each other from them.
The script imbues Tusker with a sense of wit and self-deprecation that endears you to him immediately, while Sam is a figure of both admiration and sympathy. It’s a surprisingly funny film for one that deals with such heavy subject matter.Â
Given how small the UK is it’s not surprising that road movies are few and far between, but in this, we have one that feels every bit as vital as any other film in the subgenre. Moreover, the film is not overly edited, allowing the actors to actually act, and letting conversations play out in one shot. Even when the film introduces more characters, like Sam’s sister and her family, it never loses focus on its two leads or this horrible thing coming between them.
The film also reminds us that dementia is such a horrible, insidious illness that any film that follows it makes you want it to be cured. The stripping away of a person and then killing them is perhaps the worst way to die. You get the sense from this film that even with cancer that the person still remains themselves even as they fight it, but dementia first strips a person of their identity, then their independence and finally their life.Â
The subject of suicide in the face of illness is not one to be taken lightly and the film doesn’t, it treats it with the utmost respect and dignity, and that is what the film is. Dignified. It’s a film that doesn’t want to be big on human suffering, and though emotions run high at points, it never revels in the worst aspects of humanity. Like the two leading performances, Macqueen also keeps his direction and his writing dignified throughout.
With moments of levity thanks to two fantastic lead roles, even at its darkest Supernova remains a truly human drama, and a moving and hopeful film about love.
