Movies into Film
Spider
Directed by David Cronenberg
Canada/UK, 2003
DOWN THE SPOUT
Richardson and Master Hall in Spider (Sony Pictures Classics)
“Africa—now there’s a dark continent for you,” declares an elderly British chap near the beginning of David Cronenberg’s Spider. It’s the best line in the movie, although the linguistic competition is hardly formidable: the title character (Ralph Fiennes) communicates almost entirely in mutters.
Not that I’m trying to damn this movie with faint praise, but at least I wasn’t tempted to get up and walk out on it. In the Cronenberg pantheon of horribleness—of which no better example exists than 1979’s external fetus classic The Brood—Spider rates as a mild exercise in blending the kitchen sink realism of 1950s British drama with a psychological spook-show. It’s Harold Pinter meets Rod Serling, and the results are inert. There’s comparatively little bloodshed, thank God, yet after making his point in the film’s midway murder scene, Cronenberg can’t resist pulling in for an extra close-up of the victim’s smashed skull. How wonderful for him.
Spider spins the webby corridors of mental illness as a form of entertainment; as might be expected, the film offers no insights into derangement at all. We merely watch Fiennes (looking spiffy in old suits) as he cavorts around, gugs and gumbles, mugs and mumbles, in ways that Cronenberg and the scenarist Patrick McGrath only hope seem enigmatic. In this non-role, the actor suggests Forrest Gump as re-imagined by Dr. Strangelove.
A compelling film could be made about revisiting a younger self in order to sort out the present hash of life. Caryl Churchill achieved something akin to this in her brilliant play Cloud 9. Yet Spider the elder’s visits to Spider the boy (well acted by Bradley Hall) are mere postures, as skin deep as the filmmakers’ fixation on the Madonna/whore complex. To that end, Miranda Richardson plays a triple role—a mother, a prostitute, a domineering authority figure—which gives her three times the opportunity to up end the screenplay’s shallowness. – NPT
March 2003
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com