Deep in the nerve center control room of the Internet, a light is pinging. It has never lit up before, but now it glows an insistent Millennial pink. Because, finally, beloved cocktail hunk and raconteur Stanley Tucci and the discerning Anglophile’s Mr. Darcy of choice Colin Firth have gotten together. In movie form, at least, as the couple at the center of Harry Macqueen’s new film Supernova (in theaters January 29, on VOD February 16). It’s a casting that feels almost meme’d into being, a pairing emerged from social media’s viral soup, a happy golem of retweeted zaddy content. What a lark!
That’s all that’s remotely fun about Supernova, a somber drama about the anticipation of grief. Tucci’s character, Tusker, faces early onset dementia; his partner, Sam, watches helplessly. The couple has decided to take a road trip in a camper van, wending through the picturesque Lake District of England, seeing some wealthy friends along the way and having heavy conversations. This is not exactly Tucci fixing drinks while Firth looks stiff but lovable in a turtleneck sweater.
This is—as Supernova advertises in every frame—a very serious movie. A movie about big things, tough stuff, the kind of clenching drama you expect to win awards because so many of them have in years past. Supernova, despite a title that suggests a bright and glorious burst of energy, is a ponderous movie, a story about the end of life so determined to be taken gravely that it doesn’t let anything actually live. It’s abstractly tragic, about a vague idea of something rather than anything or anyone specific. Dementia is scary and sad. That’s about as particular as Supernova gets.
Macqueen has said that the impetus to make the film stemmed from personal experience, after witnessing people in his orbit lost to dementia at too-young ages. (Any age is too young for that annihilating condition, of course.) There’s none of that individual touch in Supernova, though. It’s all the broadest of imaginings, faked to sound like intimacy. The film’s stilted, halting dialogue is meant to suggest Tusker and Sam’s closeness—they finish each other’s terse sentences, or something. But instead of drawing us in, making us lean forward to suss out the private narrative held between these two men, the opaqueness of the writing pushes us away. It’s evasive, all implication without any tissue or muscle behind it.
Supernova seems carefully modeled after spare domestic dramas like 45 Years or Another Year, movies that deftly synthesize the shorthand, half-telepathic communication of people in long-term relationships. But those films understand the complex, dynamic histories and nuances of their characters, even if they go unspoken in the actual text. Supernova, on the other hand, seems to operate from the assumption that all that’s needed to be profound is the stoniness, the silence.
There is also, of course, the specter of dementia looming tallest in the film’s leaden structure. The condition is harrowingly illustrated in the upcoming film The Father, which palpably renders the horror and sorrow swirling around a London flat as its resident disappears into the fog. In Supernova, Tusker’s ailment comes across as a mere violation of the cozy, bourgeois life he and Sam have created, a rude interruption of Tusker’s no doubt erudite writing and Sam’s classical piano playing. We get no keen sense of the destruction coming, nor of that which has already occurred.
There’s a curious politeness toward Tusker’s plight, an insistence on elegant confrontation rather than ragged emotion. Maybe that is just who these characters are supposed to be, bottled up aesthetes offended by dementia’s mess. That makes it tough to genuinely feel for them, though, even as the film strenuously demands our care. There needn’t have been screaming and crying, but more ripples of disquiet and anguish would certainly give the film more texture.
Tucci and Firth try to make the best of thin material. There has been some faint online grumbling about the fact that both Tucci and Firth are straight men in real life, yet another instance of gay actors losing out on the opportunity to play gay characters. That aspect of Supernova doesn’t bother me as much as other things do, though. Both Tucci and Firth are thoughtful actors who have played gay before, resisting stereotype and locating a legible humanity. (Even when, in Firth’s case, the film is something as gaudy and risible as A Single Man.) The real problem is that they’re just not given enough to work with; innate charms can only polish wooden dialogue so much.
The prospect of seeing these two frequently faved actors playing at love might be enough to draw audiences to Supernova. And maybe those understandably in need of good cry right now will extract enough catharsis from this overly studied, undercooked tearjerker. But those viewers deserve better, as do Tucci and Firth. As does dementia, frankly. Supernova’s tasteful, minimalist approach precludes true connection and meaning. Audiences would be better off putting on their reading glasses and watching Amour. That’s a rare occasion, isn’t it? When one can point to a Michael Haneke film and say, That one has more heart.
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