While all awards-season eyes were on Anthony Hopkins’s showy turn in the psychological melodrama The Father, Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci received scant attention for their more underplayed roles in this similarly dementia-themed drama. It’s easy to see why Supernova got overlooked; for all its awards-friendly subject matter, this is more of a bittersweet breakup movie than a hot-topic picture. It’s a love story that lifts its entertaining riffs from romcoms and odd-couple, end-of-the-road movies to melancholic effect. While the result may occasionally get bogged down by dramatic contrivance, it’s generally buoyed up by a pair of likably bickering performances from the two leads.
Long-time partners Sam (Firth) and Tusker (Tucci) are “back on the road again”, steering their ageing but functional camper van across the country, revisiting old haunts, with their faithful dog, Ruby, in tow. Having been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, novelist Tusker has neglected to pack his meds, exasperating Sam, who seems to be in denial about his partner’s deteriorating condition. A respected musician, Sam has a recital ahead of him, after which he plans to call it a day, dedicating his every waking moment to Tusker. But Tusker has other plans, determined to be the master of his fate, taking matters of life and death into his own hands.
Actor turned writer-director Harry Macqueen, who made 2014’s Hinterland, describes Supernova as an attempt to make a film about “what we are willing to do for the people we love”, and “how we live and love and laugh, even as we near the end of our time”. That may sound toe-curlingly trite, but the film has plenty of low-key charm and humour, not least in Sam and Tusker’s believable, tetchy in-car interactions. As the road ahead beckons, the pair swap sardonic barbs about everything from gear changes (“How about just exploring the outer regions of fifth gear?”) to map-reading skills and the fact that their satnav sounds like Margaret Thatcher (“First it’s section 28, now she’s going to tell us where to go on holiday”). Arriving among friends and family, Tusker makes light of his condition (“I’m fit as a fiddle. What’s your name again?”), while Sam declares himself to be “strong enough” to handle whatever lies ahead. Yet even he concedes that the future scares him.
There are clear echoes of the Oscar-winning Still Alice, not least in a scene in which Tusker is told: “You’re still you, the guy he fell in love with”, to which he drily replies: “No, I’m not, I just look like him. Which is a shame.” But it’s in the more incidental moments that Supernova hits home, such as a brief but beautifully observed exchange in which Tusker politely agrees that he’d love to see news clippings about new research into his illness, his weary face and generous words telling utterly different stories.
Taking its title from a gentle subplot about astronomy (a key speech concerns the death of stars and the curiously regenerative fate of their fragmented dust), Macqueen’s script can at times be a touch too declarative for its own good. When Tusker tells Sam: “I want to be remembered for who I was and not who I am about to become”, there’s a sense that the film doesn’t quite trust the audience to figure this out for themselves. Yet Tucci wisely keeps his foot off the stagey gas, allowing us instead to focus on Firth’s reaction – a mixture of love, anger, refusal and regret, all filtered through an underlying fear of being alone, of facing life without the one he loves. Watching Supernova, I was reminded that one of my favourite Firth performances came in Marc Evans’s 2004 psychological drama Trauma, a sorely underrated gem that first showcased Firth’s uncanny ability to express repressed pain through tiny gestures.
Handsome cinematography by Dick Pope effectively contrasts the rolling vistas through which the camper van travels with the cramped intimacy of the couple’s relationship, with starscapes bookending the drama to lyrical effect.
