MOVIES

Superman Returns
A passing demographer, faced with a crowd lining up to watch “Superman Returns,” will find much cause for reflection. There, in heady profusion, will be the flower of American youth, all of them waiting—with that blend of sullenness and agitation peculiar to teen-age boys—to see whether the special effects will meet their fastidious standards. With them will be parents of both sexes, affecting tedium but actually in the throes of a hidden thrill, hoping for a nostalgic return to the Christmas of 1978, when they necked in the back row to the surge of the John Williams score and the voice of Christopher Reeve. Dotted here and there will be Supermaniacs—some of them sporting red underpants, others in panty hose of royal blue, none of them happily married. Last, and quite alone, will be a weary cinéaste, submitting himself to two and a half hours of blockbuster because, and only because, it represents a final chance to witness the union of Eva Marie Saint and Marlon Brando.

They do not physically meet onscreen, but, for fans of “On the Waterfront,” simply to see them together under the auspices of a single movie will be enough. Saint, her beauty still rendered mysterious by that faint air of distraction, plays the mother who adopted Superman when he first fell to earth, and to whom he now pays a return plummet, travelling back to the family homestead by fireball. Brando resumes the role of Jor-El, which sounds to me like a failed airline but is in fact the Kryptonish name of our hero’s father. What this entails is a posthumous holographic rerun of Brando’s meringue-haired turn from the original movie; as Jor-El drones instructions to his son (“You will see my life through your eyes”), moviegoers will be asking why, if the director, Bryan Singer, was hellbent on resurrecting a Brando performance, he had to pick this one. Why not bring back Terry Malloy, from “On the Waterfront,” mumbling reassurance from a bloodied mouth? Who wouldn’t take advice from Stanley Kowalski? Or Colonel Kurtz? One scene with him and even the Man of Steel would snap.

Superman, we learn, has been AWOL for five years. He claims to have been visiting his native planet, now a ruinous wasteland. Having dropped in on Mother, he travels to Metropolis in the guise of Clark Kent and retrieves his old job on the Daily Planet. Its editor is Perry White (Frank Langella), whose nephew Richard (James Marsden) combines the tasks of assistant editor and swain to Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth). Lois herself, far from lying idle during Superman’s absence, has by now amassed (a) a son and (b) a Pulitzer Prize, for her essay titled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.” Hell hath no fury like an earthling scorned.

Also back in the saddle is Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey), who has been refining his vocation as an anti-Robin Hood: stealing from the rich, giving to himself, and not even considering the poor. With his band of merry thugs, he grabs magic crystals from Superman’s arctic hideout, which is wondrously framed as a kind of frozen cathedral. What these are I never really gathered, but their potency is plain: just add water, and bang goes the power supply of the Eastern United States. Add more crystals to more water, and up from the seabed rises a fresh landmass, on which—if you are Luthor—you plan to build a whole new continent of your own devising. Picture my disappointment as I realized that, for all the pizzazz of “Superman Returns,” its global weapon of choice would not be terrorism, or nuclear piracy, or dirty bombs. It would be real estate. What does Warner Bros. have in mind for the next installment? Superman overhauls corporate pension plans? Luthor screws Medicare?

Spacey certainly enjoys himself in the part, there being nobody else for him to enjoy, and he sprinkles a few grace notes over the basic maleficence. “Krrrrrryptonite,” he trills, in celebration of Superman’s least favorite substance. Our villain’s dress sense, too, like that of Parker Posey in the role of his disposable sidekick, has a lustre and a fussy correctness that are tailored to within a quarter inch of camp. Spacey must be one of the few men in the business who can slip into chocolate corduroy and get away with it. I saw him onstage last year, when he played Dexter in a revival of “The Philadelphia Story,” and the arch tone of his delivery gave some of his speeches the swing and kick of a song; all that suavity came to naught, however, when you noticed the wrinkles in his tuxedo—not his fault, just a cinched theatrical budget. Here, in a film that cost more than two hundred million dollars, the clothing is without flaw (save for a polar-white overcoat, which Dick Tracy should have refused to lend out), but the character beneath is in tatters. Spacey dug around in Dexter, unveiling the wistful, Gatsbyish diffidence in the playboy; with Luthor, however, there is nothing to reveal. The actor may toy with his lines, but you feel a glazing of ennui as he realizes that the whole movie is stuck in toytown, where depth is against the law.

Bryan Singer, who last worked with Spacey on “The Usual Suspects,” has since moved on, if not up, to two helpings of “X-Men,” and now “Superman Returns.” It is clearly the fate of a smart young director—Hollywood would call it a reward—to be garlanded with the opportunity to stop making films about human beings and start attending to the preternatural. Every time another Marvel or DC product is dusted off, lavished with computer programs, and pumped up into a motion-picture event, we hear the same inflated claims: this superhero is different; we will uncover this man’s art and that man’s scope; we will show you what makes them tick, or levitate, or spin. Even Ang Lee fell prey, rummaging around for the soul of the Incredible Hulk, until it became clear that the poor old minty monster didn’t have one. The fact is that the only first-rate work to have fed off comic books was done by Roy Lichtenstein forty years ago, and the only comic-book movies to show any lasting swagger, like “Spider-Man” and its sequel, have hewed to the Lichtenstein line and mimicked the briskness and fluorescence of the painted surface. I have listened to Batman moan about how he will never fit in, and to countless mutants voice the same complaint, and, frankly, I don’t give a damn. The ethical duties of Superman leave me cold; I just want to watch him catch a falling car.

The latest actor to don the cape is Brandon Routh, who—whether on his own initiative or not—offers not so much his personal interpretation of Superman as his best impersonation of Christopher Reeve playing Superman. This feels constrained, to say the least, allowing us limited access to Routh’s potential charm, and it thickens our suspicion that we have seen the same tale told more cheaply before, although what, exactly, was so perfect about the 1978 project that it should warrant emulation? The new Lois Lane, Kate Bosworth, is not a patch on Margot Kidder, or, for that matter, on Teri Hatcher, in the TV series; much of Singer’s casting errs toward the drippy and the dull, and your heart tends to sink, between the rampant set pieces, as the movie pauses listlessly for thought. “You wrote that the world doesn’t need a savior,” our hero says, “but every day I hear people crying out for one.” His principal solution is to thwart individual robberies, which is unlikely to put either the police or the international aid agencies out of business. As far as the film is concerned, however, such public service confirms him in the Christlike status among mortals that was predicted by his dad. “They only lack the light to show the way,” Brando declares, adding, “I have sent them you, my only son.”

Is that blasphemy? Will Christians object to the hero’s preferred floating technique, which is to descend quietly through space in the Crucifixion pose? I imagine not, if only because “Superman Returns” tries so hard to qualify as family viewing, which is another way of saying that its vague spiritual leanings resemble those of a sophisticated child. “The Usual Suspects” was a game by comparison, and yet the Spacey figure in that film, Keyser Soze, was an infinitely tougher conceit than the Man of Steel; he was a man with the ambitions of a superman, and the extremity of that delusion made him at once venomous, elusive to the touch, and richly entertaining. After that, any actual superman was bound to be a bore. “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and superman—a rope over an abyss.” That is Nietzsche, coiner of the Übermensch, and in “Thus Spake Zarathustra” he scorns what he calls “extraterrestrial hopes” in favor of those, rooted on earth, who struggle to overcome the weakness of their own humanity. That is a proper, if perilous, subject for grownup cinema, and I for one have grown tired of supermen, and superwomen, who start with such a flagrant advantage over the rest of us. Mind you, if Superman is such a paragon, how come he wants to save a species so universally dumb that not a single member of it recognizes him when he puts on a pair of glasses? - The New Yorker