Butler's Cinema Scene

Steve Gleason

“GLEASON”  My rating: A- 

110 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Gleason” will leave you a wreck…but in a good way.

A simple description of this documentary — it’s about a young man who is diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and must face the likelihood of an early and ugly death — is enough to scare most of us away from the movie theater.

I felt that way, too. But for all the pain, fear, anxiety and depression it contains, “Gleason” is an uplifting, life-affirming experience.

Despite being too small for the NFL, Steve Gleason became a linebacker for the New Orleans Saints. He was, according to his wife Michel, “A superhero athlete but super smart — the best of both worlds.”

Gleason became the special teams captain, playing with balls-to-the-wall fury. In the Saints’ first home game after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Gleason blocked a punt. The play became a symbol of the city’s comeback and elevated him to celebrity status in the Big Easy.

He retired in 2008. In 2011 he was diagnosed with ALS. A month later Michel learned she was pregnant.

The film that became “Gleason” started as a videoblog for the couple’s unborn child: “A gift for you, my child, whom I have not yet met.  My intention is to pass on as much as I can of who I am to you.”

Meanwhile two local filmmakers — David Lee and Ty Minton-Small — began documenting the Gleasons’ lives, practically moving in with the couple and recording nearly 1,200 hours of intimate, heart-breaking footage.  Three years into their subject’s illness they turned their footage over to documentary maker Clay Tweel (“A Fistful of Quarters: The King of Kong,” “Finders Keepers”), who whittled it down and shaped it into a two-hour feature.

Steve Gleason…on the field with the NFL’s Saints

There is stuff in here that will make you laugh. You’ll also wince, get angry, and tear up.

Despite receiving a death sentence, Steve Gleason declares that “It’s not going to crush my life even if it crushes my body.”

“Gleason” depicts in often harrowing detail how the neurological condition rapidly strips the once superb athlete of the ability to walk and eventually robs him of speech. The physical deterioration is terrifying.

But so are the lacerating emotional moments. At times Steve becomes furious at the hand fate has dealt him: “I want to punch something but I can’t.  All I can do is scream.”

Rivers, Michel and Steve Gleason

Michel is no less devastated. A tough woman, she finds herself on the emotional brink as the duties of wife, caregiver to an invalid and new mother (they had a boy, Rivers, whose birth is caught on camera) pile up until they threaten to crush her spirit.

In one jaw-dropping fly-on-the-wall moment Steve accuses her of merely going through the motions, of failing to engage and treating him like he’s already dead.

More conflict comes from Steve’s father, Mike, a workaholic who late in life converted to traditional Christianity and now pushes questions of heaven and hell on his already-burdened son and daughter-in-law. Steve rejects what he calls “the fear tactics of the Bible,” but to keep Mike quiet agrees to visit a faith-healing ceremony at a local church.

“This is bullshit,” an irate Michel fumes from her pew.

Steve creates Team Gleason, a foundation concentrating on providing the latest technology to ALS sufferers. When Medicare announces it will no longer pay for speech generating devices (essentially special computers) for patients who have lost the ability to speak, Team Gleason goes to work.  The result: The Steve Gleason Law, which guarantees that such technology will be made available under Medicare.

You’d expect “Gleason” to conclude with the death of its subject. Happily that is not the case.

Steve underwent a tracheotomy that allows a mechanical lung to do the breathing his own body can no longer handle. He’s largely paralyzed, but his mind is sharp. And barring infection, he could live another 20 years.

| Robert W. Butler