Film Details:
Directed by David Cronenberg (eXistenz, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, Naked Lunch, Dead Ringers)
Written by:
Patrick McGrath (The Grotesque)
Starring
Ralph Feinnes (Red Dragon, Schindler's List)
Gabriel Byrne (The Usual Suspects, Stigmata)
Lynn Redgrave (Gods and Monsters, Shine)
Miranda Richardson (Queenie from "Black Adder II")
John Neville (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen)
Review: by Melissa (e-mail your faithful reviewer)
Spider is one of those movies that directors make when they suddenly realize that they might have a higher calling than genre films. Cronenberg's genre films have always walked a step or two above the rest, elevating simple horror to something deeper and more elegant, but they're still genre films. Spider is clearly an effort to break away from that, to just do a straight drama, something that draws on the director's subtler instincts. Spider is to Cronenberg what The Straight Story was to David Lynch.
To be honest, it's hard to love this film. It's a very focused, tremendously intelligent, fascinating movie, and it is easy to like for its considerable merits. It is also very difficult and uncomfortable to watch.
Spider showcases a brilliant performance by Ralph Feinnes, who portrays the life of a shy, mentally-ill man who has just been released from the asylum to live in a halfway house. Feinnes plays the character almost entirely with his body posture, actions, and gestures; he utters only a handful of intelligible words throughout the course of the movie. Whether or not you like the film at all, Feinnes is fascinating to watch.
When Feinnes gets to the halfway house and struggles to fit into the routines there, he begins to recall his childhood. As he remembers his past, we not only see through his eyes, but we also see his older self watching his younger self, in a method Cronenberg played with in The Dead Zone. The movie glides so effortlessly between present and past that it is hard to tell which is which, yet you get the idea that we can't really tell the difference because the main character also can't.
As the film progresses, a puzzle forms. As the audience, we know that there was a crisis point that brought Feinnes to where he is in the present, but we don't know what it is. We know that the film is chugging towards that crisis point. But as we progress, and as Feinnes has more and more difficulty piecing together his memories, our path becomes just as muddled as his: events happen simultaneously, characters begin trading places, and things happen that don't quite make sense.
It's a hard movie to keep track of. It's certainly not for people who don't like to think while they're watching films. It's much like Memento in the effort that it takes to digest this film, though unlike Memento, Spider is even more convoluted in its portrayal of unreliable memory. I'm sad to say that the payoff isn't quite as good, but the ending does at least allow all the jumbled pieces of story to snap into place.
Spider, unlike Memento, is much more of a character study than anything, and Cronenberg constructs the film like a love letter to its central character. The director's tremendous affinity for atmosphere comes into heavy play in this film: cracked cement walls, peeling paint, radiator grates, scaffolding, and Ralph Feinnes' rumpled hair are all beautiful to Cronenberg's camera, and are recorded in subdued browns and blues. The story is so tightly interwoven with Feinnes' character that the audience doesn't even realize it until the very end.
Cronenberg has attempted a delicate balancing act with Spider, and he's successful, for the most part. The only real flaw in the film is the question of whether the conclusion is worth the work to get there. It's likely that most people will walk away from the film thinking, "Hunh. That was interesting." It's not a blow-you-away sort of film.
It is sad that Spider will likely vanish without much of a whisper. Distribution in the US was very limited, and the resulting DVD/VHS release might prove difficult to track down. It deserved much better.
DVD Details:
