It is no secret that Superman is Jewish. Not that he is a regular at Metropolis’s synagogue. However his creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel imbued the character who was first seen in 1933 with a Jewish soul forged by the experience of being an immigrant (from the planet Krypton). According to Siegel early Superman was then informed by the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany, which made him and Shuster want to create a character who could “help the despairing masses, somehow.”
In director James Gunn’s stirring reboot that soul is on full display. The superhero is played by Jewish actor David Corenswet whose doughy features (compared to his predecessor in the role, the chiselled Henry Cavill) at first seem ill-suited to playing The Man of Steel. Yet the script for which Siegel and Shuster are pleasingly credited as Gunn’s co-writers, gives the actor a wit that will, or should, win over doubters.
It helps hugely that this ninth movie iteration forgoes the interminable (in previous films) courtship between Superman’s alter ego Clark Kent and his fellow journalist at the Daily Planet Lois Lane (played here with a light comic touch by Rachel Brosnahan, the non-Jewish actor who, controversially to some, was cast as the very Jewish Mrs Maisel in the Amazon series). Instead Gunn honours a dictum held to by the best examples of storytelling, to begin at the latest possible moment in a plot.
To that end Lois and Superman are already an item and a battle between a metallic monster controlled by the criminal mastermind Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) has already been lost, resulting in a bleeding Superman slamming into the arctic tundra like a ballistic missile. Cue Krypto the dog, a scene-stealing panting best friend who has the canine equivalent of Superman’s DNA and who hinders the superhero as much as the mutt helps him.
This is first film to made under the newly formed DC Studio headed by Gunn. The high stakes question attached to it is whether the film can whet the public appetite for superhero movies that Marvel is finding no one longer wants to indiscriminately shell out for just because muscle-bound people in tight clothing can shoot colours from their hands.
This one achieves its objective by colliding the film’s world with ours. A military dictatorship wants to invade a defenceless neighbour and in Luthor’s “pocket universe” to which the action vaults through a slightly inevitable portal, millions of monkeys with brain implants bash out fake news and hate-speech on keyboards. Also here political dissidents have been extraordinarily rendered to prison cells suspended in space.
Among these nods to the tyranny of authoritarianism and our increasingly unmediated social media platforms is good deal of humour. Just as the film’s energy levels threaten to wane, up comes Mr Terrific (a terrifically deadpan Edi Gathegi), the brains of the otherwise risible superhero team the Justice Society.
Terrific decides to help Lois save Superman and refusing her offer of a lift with a contemptuous “we’ll take my ride”, they wait for his spacecraft to be revealed by his slowly rising garage door. As they wait, Mr T quietly clears his throat as if standing in a post office queue. Marvel should be worried.
Yet the heart of the film lies in Superman’s nature which is born out of an immigrant’s impulse to help the society that gave him refuge. His parents sent him to earth to ensure their son’s survival as their world was being destroyed, he explains – a sort of intergalactic Kindertransport.
And you don’t get more Jewish than that.
Classification: PG
