SPIDER
(15)
Dir: David Cronenberg 2002
Canada 1hr 38mins In English
David Cronenberg turned 60 on 15 March. It is hard to believe that this Canadian born Director has been shocking audiences for over 34 years. His first forays into film were no-budget shorts. These were followed by the low-budget shock-horror productions that made his name - Shivers, Rabid, Scanners and The Brood. His next, Videodrome, moved him up the league-table and he consolidated his position with The Dead Zone. The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Stephen King novel and, thus far, is Cronenberg's only film that he played no part in writing the script. The 1986 re-make of The Fly further enhanced his reputation - a reputation that continued its upward curve thanks to Dead Ringers and The Naked Lunch. However, an abrupt halt was called with the release of M Butterfly. Cronenberg then found himself the subject of some alarming tabloid hysteria when his next production hit the screens - Crash. eXistenZ had a much more muted reception. Spider, however, once again sees Cronenberg on top form, even if the subject is much more subtle and unsettling than the overt shock-horror for which he is famed.
Spider is a film dominated by Ralph Fiennes. Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson ably support Fiennes; also, John Neville gives a marvellous cameo performance. But is Fiennes that carries the film. His depiction of a schizophrenic is masterful. It puts in the shade other attempts, such as A Beautiful Mind and Shine, to depict the effect that this condition has upon a person and those around them. What we are shown is what Spider sees; or is it? Is all, or none, of it 'true'? Is anything of what we see, happening now - did any of it ever happen? How much of what we are shown is delusion or imagination or reality? The power of the film is testament to the brilliance of Fiennes - and Cronenberg. This is a film that has a myriad of interpretations and will stay with you long after the final credits.
The following review takes a linear view of the story and reveals much of what is shown on screen. How much it reveals of what you see is quite another matter.
Philip French, Sunday January 5, 2003, The Observer
David Cronenberg is usually
thought of, not wholly unjustly, as a horror movie director who churns our stomachs.
Equally accurately, he can be seen as a student of altered states of mind who
seeks to persuade us that our apparently normal perceptions of the world are
not too far removed from the disturbed, deranged or dangerously perverse. Spider,
his highly accomplished new picture, adapted by Patrick McGrath from his novel,
is neither a thriller nor a horror flick. It is much closer to Samuel Beckett
or to the Pinter of The Caretaker. It also resembles a pared-to-the-bone working-class
version of Hamlet, a play that brought out the aloof, articulate, aristocratic
side of Ralph Fiennes in a way that Spider enables him to show his ability to
engage us by being pathetic, inarticulate and anti-heroic.
The movie is set in and around a halfway house for discharged mental patients
in the East End of London in Thatcher's Eighties. The ill-co-ordinated, near
speechless Dennis Cleg (Fiennes) arrives after having been released into the
care of the community. Except that there is no community and no one cares. The
hostel is a cold, inhospitable place, all peeling wallpaper, decrepit furniture
and decaying linoleum, run by the severe Mrs Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave). Only
the long-time resident Terrence (John Neville), a garrulous fantasist, takes
an interest in Dennis but the most dedicated therapist would have trouble drawing
him out of his shell.
When Dennis revisits the scenes of his youth 30 years before, we are subtly
drawn into his mind as he remembers a lonely working-class boyhood, the only
son of a plumber (Gabriel Byrne) and his subdued brunette wife (Miranda Richardson).
Dad is brusque, outgoing, impatient, frequently at the pub. Mum is a kind, would-be
genteel woman who will put on lipstick only to go out for an occasional drink,
her tipple being gin-and-orange. Like the elderly doctor in Bergman's Wild Strawberries,
Dennis enters this past as an unseen stranger observing his 10-year-old self
and we join him in his memories, both vivid and unreliable. The boy sees another
woman in the pub, a blousy blonde seductress (also Miranda Richardson), who
tempts his father into sex, and then replaces his mother. This is the notion
of women divided into Madonnas and whores, but focused on a single person, because
Dennis cannot contemplate his mother as being the pure person who loves him
and the one who engages carnally with his father. The consequences of this on
a fragile, potentially schizophrenic mind are obvious, though as Cronenberg
would insist, this is everyone's experience to some degree.
What gives additional texture to a discreetly lit, subtly designed and admirably
acted film is the extended dramatic metaphor provided by the title. Dennis's
mother has epiphanous memories of beautiful spiders' webs seen during the early
morning in her country childhood and nicknames her son Spider. The nickname
is confused in his mind by her accounts of female spiders leaving their sacks
of eggs and crawling away to die. Love and death and sexual guilt are thus inextricably
linked in his mind.
As a result, Dennis, as child and adult, collects old string and rope to build
protective webs in his bedroom, with consequences that prove to be literally
murderous. Spider is a film of considerable power, likely to take its place
alongside The Go-Between, The Fallen Idol and other classics of children damaged
through trying to cope with the adult world.