Shockingly misjudged Schumacher documentary is a dereliction of duty
Schumacher 12 cert, 112 min ★★★★★
Dirs: Hanns-bruno Kammertöns, Vanessa Nöcker, Michael Wech
It has been more than eight years since anyone outside his immediate circle of intimates has seen or heard from Michael Schumacher. In December 2013, the seven-time Formula One world champion sustained injuries while skiing in the French Alps that were serious enough to warrant him being kept in a medically induced coma for six months. He was then transferred to his home on the shores of Lake Geneva, and updates on his progress since have been both cryptic and vanishingly scarce.
Though his family and fans must dearly wish otherwise, this dire accident and its limbo-like aftermath make up a critical chapter of Schumacher’s story. It is the shock that sets the awe in its mortal context – as vital when decoding what he amounts to as were Alex Ferguson’s memory-clouding brain haemorrhage; Ayrton Senna’s fatal crash at 131mph; Diego Maradona’s bloated, cocaine-fuelled decline; Amy Winehouse’s death from alcohol poisoning at 27 years old.
In the excellent recent bio documentaries about all four of those figures those shocks were rightly made shatteringly integral to the life story at hand. But in Schumacher it is treated as a postscript. No, worse than that: an inconvenience.
It is only in the last 11 minutes of this near two-hour film, produced in collaboration with the Schumacher family, that the accident itself is even mentioned. And it is discussed in such evasive terms that viewers unfamiliar with the story may initially assume that Michael has been dead for years. Over tragic violins, his wife Corinna and son Mick, himself an F1 driver, speak guardedly, the secrecy around his condition framed as a decision that will allow him to “continue to enjoy his private life as much as possible”. OK, but what kind of life is it? May we at least hear from a doctor, or see how he’s doing, even if it’s just a still image? No, the film says firmly: we may not.
In terms of craftsmanship alone, this is catastrophically misjudged. As horrible as it sounds, while watching this sequence I felt like Arbogast listening to Norman Bates serenely dissembling behind the motel reception desk in Psycho. As storytelling, meanwhile, it’s a straightforward dereliction of duty. If the officially sanctioned Michael Schumacher documentary refuses to shed even a sliver of light on the situation, it leaves the viewer mulling two uncomfortable questions. One: why on earth not? And two: with such a glaring, disingenuous omission, what purpose does the film serve?
The answer to the latter is this: as a robotic positioning exercise for the Schumacher brand. With interviews and archive footage, directors Hannsbruno Kammertöns, Vanessa Nöcker and Michael Wech walk us through his career from his arrival in Formula One in 1991 to his retirement in 2006 with an aversion to humanising details that borders on the pathological.
Legendary instances of unsportsmanlike conduct are glossed over or talked around: the biggest character flaw acknowledged on screen was his penchant for singing My Way at karaoke. The talking heads offer little but platitudes and clichés, while the endless racing footage is dry in the extreme. Here is a life not sugar-coated by cinema so much as rolled in powdered alum.