Glea­son

Watch­ing Glea­son, a doc­u­men­tary depict­ing for­mer NFL super­star Steve Gleason’s bat­tle with ALS, you’re con­stant­ly duck­ing and cov­er­ing, brac­ing for the dev­as­tat­ing gut-punch that feels inevitable. But it nev­er comes. The film cuts to black, the cred­its roll. To our relief no tragedy is shown because it hasn’t hap­pened yet. To this day, against all odds, Glea­son is still alive and fighting.

The film opens with Steve sat in his room, his thoughts spilling out for the cam­era. He explains that he’s been diag­nosed with amy­otroph­ic lat­er­al scle­ro­sis, also named Lou Gehrig’s dis­ease (aka ALS), and that it will rav­age his body, strip him of his abil­i­ty to speak, and even­tu­al­ly kill him. As if that wasn’t enough, just weeks after his diag­no­sis, he dis­cov­ers that his wife, Michel, is pregnant.

But in between these two bomb­shells, Steve spies an oppor­tu­ni­ty. He realis­es that even if the dis­ease doesn’t kill him before his son, Rivers, is old enough to remem­ber him, his symp­toms will be so advanced that his son will grow up with no knowl­edge of the spir­it­ed char­ac­ter he once was. He realis­es that, be it through death or the loss of his speech, he’ll nev­er be able to have an hon­est con­ver­sa­tion with his son. So he com­mits to record­ing reg­u­lar video jour­nals and even­tu­al­ly a doc­u­men­tary to say every­thing he pos­si­bly can with the time he has left. The way he sees it, even if he doesn’t make it through his son’s for­ma­tive years, he’ll have left enough of him­self behind for Rivers to get to know his dad even in his absence.

And boy, is Rivers in for one hell of a por­trait. Glea­son doesn’t just explore his father as a stun­ning ath­lete and as a vibrant, intel­li­gent soul. It paints a pic­ture of an entire fam­i­ly strug­gling to main­tain hope as the light is slow­ly smoth­ered out of their lives. As Steve’s dis­ease crip­ples him, he relies more and more on Michel to pro­vide around the clock care, and through her strug­gle to main­tain ener­gy, she begins to sac­ri­fice parts of her­self to main­tain what’s left of her hus­band, express­ing her shame at how that makes her feel. Steve’s father appears unable to cope with the sit­u­a­tion, although he tries to help in his own mis­guid­ed ways. At one point he takes Steve to church to par­tic­i­pate in a faith heal­ing. The result­ing images are almost sickening.

Glea­son is an incred­i­ble film, just as full of humour as it is hard­ship. But even more than that, it is a potent state­ment about the will to live. Through­out the film, we watch Steve shrink and fade as he is slow­ly robbed of the free­doms as small and pre­cious as unas­sist­ed breath­ing. But he con­tin­ues to sur­vive in spite of his fail­ing body. Steve is going to die even­tu­al­ly, and he knows this, but in the end, death is inevitable; life, how­ev­er, is a choice, and as long as that choice is still in his hands, he remains a free man.