Stan Lee (2023)

TV-14 and maybe it is only for the sake of uncomfortableness in one scene.  Sure, Stan (who narrates his own documentary posthumously) uses some really mild cursing, I don't see anything that would really take this beyond a TV-PG rating.  It's pretty innocent.  I watched it with my kids.  Maybe, at most, there are some things from history that need to be explained.  But honestly, I'm struggling to figure out the TV-14 elements of this documentary. Still, you report what you got...

DIRECTOR: David Gelb

My first exposure to this documentary was in the form of a scathing review.  I think it was from IGN, who tend to like everything, so I thought that this movie must be something truly awful.  I think IGN gave it a 3 out of 10, citing that this movie was just corporate propaganda and that it is insulting to the very mixed legacy that Stan Lee left, especially when it comes to the fractured relationships that ended with Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby.  I know that the Kirby family found the documentary to be insulting.  But I also really like a comic book documentary.  So much of my college and Masters programs were centered, to some degree or another, on comic book history.  To watch a short, well-produced documentary about one of the key figures in comic book history that I could watch with my kids was a good time.  But is it corporate fluff?

To a certain degree, I can't deny the accusation.  This is a documentary about Stan Lee on Disney+.  The perspective of the documentarians is that DC Comics might be one of the most important cultural movements on the planet.  Sure, that's a statement that I mostly agree with, but that's because I'm a fan.  I'm also a teacher who teaches with comic books, so it's nice to have some confirmation bias.  But I also have to argue with IGN's fairly simplistic take on the documentary as a whole.  Yes, this movie is very flattering to Stan Lee.  But it isn't completely divorced from some of the realities that Lee went through with his relationships with artists.  My wife almost begged me to shut it off when Lee goes on the radio and lambastes Kirby for his involvement with comics.  It was darned uncomfortable. As a comics history nerd, I couldn't stop listening to it.  I was riveted.  It really had that element of Mom and Dad fighting.  You wish that it didn't exist, but you needed to hear every word because you ahd to make sure that they weren't going to get a divorce.  

So what is the tone of this movie?  I don't get the absolute vibe that this documentary is sycophantic.  Again, I'm really pulling for this film.  If it wasn't a streaming thing, I would own this movie in a heartbeat.  It is flattering.  But the thing is, I've watched the fan documentaries before.  I've often complained that fan documentaries tend to be terrible becuase it is a bunch of self-congratulations.  I don't get the same vibe with Stan Lee.  With Stan Lee, I read touching eulogy.  Stan Lee was always a guy who loved to talk about himself.  If he was around today, he wouldn't exactly shy away from that description.  Because there are probably hundreds or thousands of hours of Stan Lee talking about his life, coupled with texts and memoirs to boot, it's kind of wonderful to hear the story of Stan Lee, condensed and edited into a proper narrative to form a documentary.  As much as it is a eulogy and a send up for a man who seemed absolutely lovely (but, again, with flaws), it more feels like Stan saying goodbye to all of his fans.

One of the thing that I have to applaud Gelb for is his use of visuals.  As much as Stan's voice is around to tell his own story, there weren't videos for a lot of his life.  After all, Stan Lee's success story really starts to blossom once the MCU was born.  Yeah, Stan Lee was always a big name in our house, but that's because we collected comic books. It wouldn't be until he started making his cameos in films that made his co-creations household names that we would start getting commonly seen video.  So Gelb does a lot of the movie in miniatures.  

I'm sure that there was probably a discussion about making sections of Lee's life in comics.  Perhaps that was a bit too on the nose.  After all, Lee did that himself in his own graphic memoir, so why tread the same ground?  But the use of miniatures, as much as miniatures had nothing to do with Stan Lee's life, creates a certain feeling of a heightened reality.  Lee is the ringmaster of his own circus.  He's the guy who lets you see what he wants to show you.  It isn't going to be reality, despite what he says.  As much as Marvel Comics claims to be the realistic of the two companies, everything that comes from Lee is a heightened version of reality.  The use of models and dioramas sells that narrative, especially when it is mixed with file footage of the man himself.

Is this a perfect documentary?  I can't give that up.  It isn't.  I love how a lot of the movie is sold.  It goes chronologically from Lee's birth in the 1920s right up to his final speech given to a graducating class (UCLA?) in 2017.  From that description, that sounds like it is going to be thorough.  Unfortunately, the chronology of Lee's life is really in-depth until 1972 and then there's a large gap in until the birth of the MCU in 2010.  As much as I care more about Lee's wins with his creativity and his losses with tense working relationships, the '80s, '90s, and aughts tell a far more somber tale.  Again, if this is a eulogy, I can see why the film didn't pick up these years.  These were years where Stan Lee was starting lawsuit after lawsuit with Marvel as a company, despite being the public face of the company.  These are the years of Pow! Entertainment.  They aren't the glory years.  Even the 2010s paint a gloss over the reality of what Stan Lee was really going through at the time.

Upon Lee's death, Brian Michael Bendis penned a short comic about the time that he really got to sit down and talk to Stan.  In that story, he was so proud of the films that he created, but revealed to Bendis that he wishes that he could see all of these movies that people kept talking about.  As much as Lee seemed like a fun-loving cameo machine, his vision had gone to the dogs by this point.  Even sadder is the fact that Lee was the victim of elder abuse for years.  These are all things that a hard-hitting documentary would hit.  But again, I'm almost happy that they didn't.  This is a eulogy, not necessarily a think piece.

And maybe I'm being too forgiving.  I absolutely don't agree with IGN's 3 out of 10.  I mean, I get it.  If I was angry and they might have the right to be angry, I could see the 3 out of 10 as a form of protest against the movie.  I've been there.  I've gotten truly angry over the rewriting of truths.  But I want to live in a world where Stan Lee was everyone's fun dad or grandpa.  It's funny.  I hear the name P.T. Barnum and I want to spit because I know that the man was a monster.  But Barnum and Lee have a lot in common.  They were showmen of their own personality.  Perhaps Lee's story isn't true.  I need the Joan stuff to be true.  The Joan story is one of my favorite real-life relationships.  But I want to live in a world where it was true.  Like Lee's focus on the heightened versions of reality, I want to imagine that Lee was a guy who loved to tell stories and take down the system through the funny pages.  But I also want the Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko stuff to fix itself as well.

For a piece of corporate propaganda, it's really well made.  It feels like it's not just there to make a buck.  I imagine that this is a movie that Lee's family would want passed down.  This is a tale of how grandpa decided to tell stories a different way and changed the way that we treated genre storytelling.  There are some warts in there.  I think everyone's relationship with their elders should reveal some warts.  But part of me was just moved that there was this guy who really liked what he was doing and did it.  That's a great story.