Movie Review: 'Supernova' Dying a Hollywood Death

Hollywood sure seems to want to see those who’ve been diagnosed with deathly illnesses dead. I don’t intend to be flippant about life and death and the choices that people make about the end of their life. Nor do I wish to make any kind of political statement regarding end of life and whether or not those with traumatic illness should have a choice in whether or not they end their life.

Rather, I am merely calling attention to a trend in Hollywood to make movies about the end of life that all turn out the same way. The latest is the movie Supernova starring Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth. The two play a gay couple going on holiday in the English countryside. One is a concert pianist and the other is a writer and one of them has dementia. Slowly but surely, memory and other means of life are slipping away due to this horrendous disease.

The man wishes to end his life before he loses any more of his faculties and the drama is what surrounds his decision and how his lover deals with the end of the life of his beloved. Hollywood has a way of making this decision seem very, I don’t want to say ‘easy;’ but at no point in movies like Supernova is there really any instance where the person discussing suicide is ever going to change their mind.

Dying characters in movies such as Blackbird, Me Before You, to now Supernova, approach the end of life with dignity intact and bravery as their assigned trait as they end their life through pharmaceutical means rather than the natural progression of their affliction. I am not judging that choice. Rather, I wish to judge how Hollywood uses this as a trope to make it look rather... simple to end your life.

In each case, Blackbird starring Susan Sarandon, Me Before You starring Sam Claflin, and now Supernova, feature incredibly well off characters who are easily able to obtain the means to end their life in style. For Sarandon, she has a rich doctor husband, played by Sam Neil, to obtain her needed poison. In Me Before You, Sam Claflic has the means to go to a famed European retreat in the Alps where they can legally end your life for you for the price of a few million Euros.

In Supernova, our protagonists aren’t quite as well off but they aren’t poor by any means. The dying man is able to end his life in an English country cottage on bright white linens while listening to classical music. It’s all very lovely and dignified and painless. Each of our protagonists slowly slips into sleep as their beautiful family mourns them with tears and hugs and the good fortune of knowing there is an inheritance soon to come.

This is a long way for me to go to simply point out that stories like these, aside from the certainty of death, which we all share, aren’t very relatable to the average audience. While I am perfectly capable of manufacturing empathy for my fellow man regardless of his means, movies aren’t about real people, generally speaking. Thus, a movie has to work a little harder to earn my genuine compassion for the characters presented.

In Blackbird, I eventually did come around to Susan Sarandon’s heroic performance as a woman dying of cancer while telling her whiny, bratty adult children to get their acts together. I was not able to find similar empathy however, for Sam Claflic in Me Before You as his character's ludicrous wealth and otherwise fulfilling life, aside from being paralyzed from the neck down, made him difficult to sympathize with.

Supernova, the supposed subject of this review, lands somewhere in the middle for me. I felt for this couple, Tusker and Sam, played respectively by Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth, but it didn’t quite draw me all the way in. Several moments are very affecting, even movingly romantic but the movie never fully brought me to invest my emotions. When the end arrived it wasn’t that I didn’t care about the characters involved but I didn’t fully relate to them.

Supernova was written and directed by Harry MacQueen and it’s a very polished and professional effort. That said, it’s not particularly witty and while it is romantic and quite sad, there is an inert quality that leaks in throughout the movie. The film tends to stop and ponder the same things again and again and never really engages what is happening to the affected character. The movie pays lip service to the idea of caretaker fatigue but also appears to view the notion as something conveniently avoidable thanks to suicide.

It’s hard to say, it’s not easy to think about, but most of us are not going to be able to die pretty. Point of fact, most of us are likely going to die in a manner that is not particularly dignified. Even those who end up making the choice about how our life should end won’t likely have the means to do so in a lovely English cottage while classical music lulls us into the afterlife. I’m not saying Hollywood should make that movie about undignified death but perhaps a compromise.

For instance, the new movie Our Friend with Casey Affleck, Jason Segal and Dakota Johnson. This is a movie that pulls no punches about the ugliness that will visit many of us at the end of our life. Dakota Johnson’s Nicole struggles and cries and rages against the dying of the light in a fashion that eschews dignity for the reality of a real struggle. We aren’t shown some of the more horrific aspects of her death, why would we be, but we get a really good sense of it and a realistic portrayal that is relatable to a wider audience of people.

Supernova is not a bad movie because it contains suicide instead of the struggle for life among those with a terminal disease. Supernova isn’t a bad movie at all really. The performances are strong, the direction is impeccably professional, and other such praises. It just never reached me in the way it was intended to. It’s too simple. It’s just a little too pat. I was avoiding this word but well… it’s a little too easy.