Title: Confessions of a Superhero
Genre: Documentary
Director: Matthew Ogens
Release: (2007)
“Look! Up on the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superma-, oh, wait… no. My bad, I think it’s just some failed, middle-aged actor plummeting to his death from the roof of the U.S. Bank building. Never mind. Where are we doing lunch?”
Ok, so that scene may not have ever really occurred in this movie, but it’s pretty much how I imagine it would have ended had director Matthew Ogens remained on the scene for another few years or so, documenting the continuing downward spiral of the lives of his profoundly pathetic subjects in his sadly hilarious 2007 documentary, Confessions of a Superhero.
Confessions of a Superhero follows four (literally) tragicomic would-be actors as they spend their days on Hollywood Boulevard as character impersonators, snapping keepsake pictures with google-eyed tourists for tips. Along the way he meets a Superman who’s beginning to lose sight of where he begins and his 1950’s era, super do-gooder Superman persona ends. And a Batman with anger management issues and delusions of grandeur, who for some reason only visits his psychiatrist in full costume – including the black make-up to cover the skin of his eyelids inside the mask. There’s a Wonder Woman who spends most of her time wondering what could possibly be wrong with her marriage to the guy she met and married within four days of moving to L.A. on a whim. And there’s a relatively likable Hulk who you can’t help but notice has a distractingly similar facial structure whether his giant Hulk head mask is on or off.
As we learn more and more detail about the almost unbelievable depths of each of their own delusions about the state of their lives (I counted at least 8 separate times that Batman mentions how no one will give him a fair chance as an actor because “looks too much like George Clooney”), Ogens has the tremendously effective understanding to just sit back as a passive observer and let each of his subjects reveals their own particular flavor of crazy in their own way. Interspersed with occasional, brief interview segments to add depth in certain places, this might just be the best Christopher Guest film Christopher Guest never made. Every one of the subjects in this film comes across with the same combination of absurd sincerity and a complete lack of self-awareness that has become the trademark of Guest’s own style of satire.
But of course it’s not a satire, which makes this film sort of a personality litmus test that may teach you something about your own capacity for empathy that you didn’t want to know. There is something undeniable though, even if it’s not particularly admirable to admit, about the fact that every single thing about this movie is hilarious – except the fact that it’s true.
Grading
Story: N/A
Acting: N/A
Visuals: A (Great use of long, silent examinations of details in the environment)
Originality/Innovation: B
Enjoyability: A
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