f13.net forums - Boredom for the Avant-Garde: DVD Review of Spider

Good intentions pave the road to the hell that is bad movies.

Such is the case with the movie Spider directed in 2002 by David Cronenberg, starring Ralph (it's RAPH DAMNIT!) Fiennes, Miranda Richardson and Lynn Redgrave. Based on the novel by Patrick McGrath, who also wrote the screenplay, on paper this sounds like a movie that is sure to not only entertain, but be a damn fine FILM™. I use the trademark FILM term to denote those movies that critics love but that most people hate; artsy films that don't involve such popcorn effluvia as gigantic explosions, overdone CGI and distinct lack of plot. Now there is nothing wrong with FILM™, per se, except that only true master filmmakers can really create entertaining movies out of such material. Many just end up being pretentious snorefests, like The English Patient, even to those who can appreciate their artistry.

Spider is the latter type. Unfortunately, only by watching the movie, then watching the commentary can this really be discovered.

The original novel by Patrick McGrath was meant to be a clinical analysis of schizophrenia through the fictional story of the main character Spider, but which eventually attempted to stray from clinical analysis for the sake of telling an effective story. Not having read the book, I can't say whether it was successful at this or not. However, the director decided to completely ignore any attempt to classify the character's behavior in clinical symptoms of this disease yet somehow ended up portraying the symptoms quite accurately. Nowhere in the movie is the word ever mentioned, or a diagnosis for the character's infirmity ever made. Had I not read the sleeve copy, I would not have known the story for a good ten minutes into the film.

The story is that Mr. Cleg has been released too early from an asylum to a halfway house in London's scruffier section. He is attempting to put some kind of sense to the visions and hallucinations he has had of his past, trying to find some reason for his current state. For most of that first ten to twenty minutes of the movie, there is very little dialogue. Fiennes merely wanders around the streets of London mumbling incoherently to himself and displaying curious behaviour involving bits of string and other detritus he picks up on the streets. He speaks with one of the inhabitants of the halfway house as well as the lady who runs the house. Hints about domineering abuse on the part of the house matron are introduced, but nothing ever comes of them. Finally, after what seems forever, the plot actually begins.

The bulk of the story takes place in curious flashback sequences. Cleg, or Spider as his mother calls him for some strange reason, watches his past life as an invisible observer on the scene, repeating lines that are spoken by himself, his mother, his father and other participants in the scene in his normal mumbling way. It's an interesting visual twist on the flashback motif, but like most of the movie, is just too subtle to be effective. The director means it as a visual clue that the scene we are seeing is as it happened; since the character is prone to hallucinations, this can be crucial to discern the meaning of a scene. What queers up this entire tactic, though, is that we aren't really ever told that the character is supposed to be experiencing hallucinations. In the "modern" world of his present life, he doesn't experience anything of the sort until much too late into the movie for it to hit home. By the time it does, I was more apt to attribute the hallucination to some supernatural bit of trickery akin to David Lynch's worst methods of "character switcheroo" such as in Mulholland Drive. There's a difference between being subtle and being obscure, and Cronenberg hits obscure right on the wrong end. We're never even told why Cleg's mother insists on nicknaming the kid Spider, other than some obscure story about spider's webs in the country. It doesn't explain the nickname at all, and I imagine being nicknamed Spider by your mother shouldn't be considered a positive thing.

The lack of direct exposition or even a cursory bit of explanation ends up hurting the movie much more than helping it. I'm not the type of viewer who wants to be spoonfed information, but I'm also not the type who likes to be dropped in the deep end of the ocean when I wasn't even aware I needed to bring my swimsuit. The narrative attempts a dangerous balancing act of obscuring and revealing information in subtle ways, but it falls too far on the subtle side, relying on the audience to guess things based on Fiennes performance. And while Fiennes gives a good performance, nothing in the story actually provides empathy for the character at all. The confusion over what exactly is wrong with the guy puts a distance between audience and actor that makes any sort of empathy impossible.

And that's where the movie really fails. It's flat boring. As intellectually-stimulating a movie as it could be, in the end, the intellect isn't stimulated because it's slow and dull. It feels altogether clinical in approach, as if it is all thought and no creative passion. I've long admired both Cronenberg as a director and Fiennes as an actor, but neither one really does their best in this movie. They want to; their intentions are to make an emotionally-moving, intellectually-stimulating movie, but they've ended up with a cure for insomnia. I will have to give some praise to Miranda Richardson for a great performance. She takes on three very different roles in this film, and plays them all superbly. She's an actress I've admired since her turn as Queen Elizabeth in the second season of The Black Adder, and had this movie been better, her performance would have been more appreciated. As it is, she was the lone bright spot in an otherwise drab movie.