Tufted greybeards, warm flannel shirts, woven knits, a candlelit glow to weathered faces. Autumnal warmth spreads throughout this deeply tender film like a gentle hand to a tired cheek. In “Supernova“, partners Sam (Colin Firth) and Tusker (Stanley Tucci) are beginning a trip up to the Lake District, setting off in a cozy motorhome to visit relatives and enjoy a holiday together. Landscapes layered with the amber tones of the season float past the windows, their vast beauty an evocative companion on the couple’s journey. Love, laden with sadness and the last fragments of hope, is well-worn into them.
Writer and director Harry Macqueen offers up ultimately a very simple story for his second feature, an exploration of love in its various forms that grows into a measured and heartfelt portrait of a life spent together and the pain of debilitating illness. Tusker has been forgetting things – small things like where his glasses are (sitting on the top of his head), or the word “triangle”, and bigger things like how he’s managed to wander miles down the road, and how to continue writing his next novel. When we meet the couple, they have been living with Tusker’s dementia diagnosis for a while and the signs suggest his condition is only getting worse. His announcement that he’s left behind his medication for the trip is no forgetful accident, but a deliberate step taken to exert some control over his own body.
From there on, the film’s narrative feels like a series of goodbyes. Sam and Tusker travel up to visit family with the intention of rounding off their trip at a piano concert where Sam, a talented musician, has been invited to perform. There is an impending sense that this will be the last opportunity for such activities, and Tusker’s own ideas about when his active participation in his own life, and the lives of the people around him, might reach an end move to the fore. A push and pull between the ways both men want to take charge of their story plays out, a gradual offering back and forth of the servitude and liberty each wants to provide for the other. Some of the smaller revelations that arise throughout the film – that Tusker made Sam get a dog months earlier so that he would have a future companion for example – are deployed with a deft directorial hand, lingered on for only a moment in a line of dialogue to build up the layers of their narrative with a ingrained sense of the history between them.
It’s the natural ease and quiet, grounded emotion of Firth and Tucci here that soften the film’s perhaps more cliched edges, the lines of dialogue or narrative beats that feel a little predictable. We feel the years shared between these veteran actors translated into their characters, and there is the sense of a real-life friendship in the foundations of this fictional love story. Every hug, or kind word, or the tinkling of fingers on a hand as if they were pressing piano keys, feels effortlessly sincere. The couple’s fondness for stargazing, where the film’s title comes into play, is a neat (if a little earnest) device that allows Macqueen to focus in on the minutiae of their lives while also expanding outwards. If, as Tusker tells a young family friend, we are all made of stardust, there is hope that the cycles of this grand universe will continue on – that Sam, and Tusker, and their love will settle into the very particles of the world.
The attention to feeling in gentle tones holds “Supernova” away from exaggerated tragedy and melancholy, while still capturing the undeniable heartbreak of living with dementia. “You’re not supposed to mourn someone while they’re still alive,” Tusker says calmly at one point, with the powerful lucidity of a man acutely aware of the ways in which his own brain is changing day by day, even as that same cognitive function deteriorates.
There can be tragedy in all illnesses, but dementia carries such a particular weight. The process of loss and grieving happens in tandem with the decline of those affected, a desperate reach to preserve memories as someone gradually forgets. It is not only saying goodbye to a loved one, it is having to live with the knowledge that you have also been left behind. Warmth and kindness comes naturally in Macqueen’s film because of the ways it understands the unspeakable cold of such loneliness. [B]