The title of Waiting for “Superman” comes from an anecdote told at the top of the film by a charismatic educator named Geoffrey Canada. Canada (shown above talking to some students) talks about growing up reading comic books in the South Bronx, and believing that Superman would one day swoop in and save his downtrodden neighborhood. When his mother told him the Man of Steel wasn’t real, Canada began to cry, for the first time realizing that no one was out there to come to the rescue. Depressing point, but this is a depressing movie.
It’s common knowledge that the nation’s public education system is broken. We’ve all seen the horrific stats and watched as kids in other industrialized nations lap Americans in math and science. Waiting For “Superman” uses an appealing visual style that mixes documentary footage, 1950s education films, modern news broadcasts and clever animation to lay it all out in sickening detail. The approach is similar to Davis Guggenheim’s previous film, An Inconvenient Truth, but this time the director widens his focus from one man on a mission to people struggling at multiple levels of the system.
This article appears in Oct 7-13, 2010.