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Spider
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Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne
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The promotional poster for Spider presents an impressive, yet perplexing image of David Cronenberg's psychological drama. With its eerie design, featuring Ralph Fiennes' harrowed face, and accompanied by a collection of positive notices, it is likely to draw a larger audience than the film may have done on its own merits. Not that the film is poor in any way. On the contrary, it is one of Cronenberg's most uncompromising films, both in terms of the way it burrows itself into the central character's damaged mind, and in its unwillingness to offer audiences any relief. But as contemporary mainstream cinema, Spider has little, if anything, to recommend it. And yet, to miss it would be a very great shame.
Adapted by Patrick McGrath from his novel, Spider tells the story of Dennis 'Spider' Clegg, a recently released patient of a psychiatric hospital, whose entire existence is caught between his present day reality and hyper-real memories of traumatic moments from his childhood. In particular, Denis constantly re-lives the period when the fabric of his early years - the bonds of familial love - was disintegrating.
The gravity with which Cronenberg approaches his material is made clear from the film's opening scene; a deliberate tracking shot through passengers alighting a train. The shot sets the pace of the film, slow in its determination to uncover every little detail of Dennis' life and revealing how he perceives the world around him. However, the scene is equally important in terms of sound. The babble of the commuters gives way to the quieter, yet equally mysterious, dialogue Denis holds with himself. His mental state, a form of schizophrenia treated with more complexity than most films (although, as one critic has pointed out, the association of short trousers with the mentally ill has become something of a tired and clichéd signifier), is a world of confusion and incomprehension. The sounds he emits not only show how removed he is from the world around him, but also offer an indication of how he perceives that world; the chatter of the commuters is just as alien to him as his ramblings are to us.
McGrath and Cronenberg blend the narrative's timelines with aplomb (a skill very much present in Canadian directors, if Cronenberg, Robert Lepage and Atom Egoyan are anything to go by - especially Egoyan, with the clever employment of time in his underrated adaptation of William Trevor's Felicia's Journey (1999)). With both the young and older Denis sharing the screen in many scenes, Cronenberg is able to show Spider's past as immediate to him as the present, whilst also providing a commentary on it - be it in terms of mumbles or the agonised expressions on Fiennes' face. This device enables Cronenberg to stay one step away from the confines of kitchen sink realism. Though the locations hardly seem fake, the film has an air of unreality to it. As with Crash (1996) and Dead Ringers (1988), Cronenberg perfectly uses the surroundings to embellish upon the damaged state of the central character. Surely now, having proven that his films were never merely a collection of interesting ideas fleshed out with moments of gore, Cronenberg can finally be acknowledged as the exceptional film-maker he undoubtedly is.
However, the film ultimately succeeds due to Ralph Fiennes' astonishing performance. Wedged in between the banal Red Dragon (2002) and Maid in Manhattan (2002), Spider proves once again how remarkable an actor he is. Eschewing sentimentality, Fiennes ensures Denis is a sympathetic character, whose illness is more complex than the result of some destructive Oedipal yearnings as a youth. Well supported by Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson (both of whom give their best performances in years), Fiennes makes Spider compelling viewing and gives modern cinema one of its most tragic, and all too human, characters.
Reviewed by Ian Haydn Smith
Reader comments about Spider
Mary F. Sibley (sfsibley@aol.com) writes:
From the opening frames of the credits, the church hymn, the Rorschach prints and the measured and precise pacing of them, we are entering a world of a severely disengaged man, who has had the spectre of schizophrenia as his constant companion, both in his waking and sleeping hours. The mumblings and rememberances of Dennis Clegg (Ralph Fiennes) combine to make for a journey down Memory Lane that is unlike any that rational, thinking people would care to take, let alone inhabit and from which there is very little chance of escape.
Fiennes spends the length of the film attempting to piece together bits and pieces of times past in his childhood, that may or may not have happened. The prize in this herculanean effort is not so much to discover the unseemly goings on of his father, but rather seeking a discourse into the inner workings of Clegg's mind and what it potentially holds and abandons at will.
Dennis Clegg has been released into the care of a matron (Lynn Regrave) in a halfway house in a decaying, dying section of London, that has become the home, heart and soul for others of his ilk; the mentally disabled, discharged from the asylum, but not quite ready for habitation in the outside world at large. His lodgings represent the underbelly of a netherworld that caters to no one and where rehabilitation is a foreign word, absent from the vocabulary of those in charge.
Redgrave plays Mrs. Wilkinson, the spawn of Nurse Ratchet, with a demeanor as cold as the grave and as uncaring as any you are likely to see. Hers is a job, nothing more, nothing less; an automaton in the flesh. John Neville (teamed again with Fiennes. He was in "Sunshine.") as Terrance, another resident of the house, has etched a character who sums up the medicated and serene patient seen as a non-threat to the establishment, but who attempts to warn Clegg of the "queenly" attitudes of Wilkinson and the powers she holds. This British character actor's small part in this film is a gem deserving of recognition.
Every movement that Clegg makes is guaranteed to bear witness to a recollection and to focus on events as perceived in his ever crumbling mind. Once his journey into neverland begins, we are brought along ever so slowly so that we capture these moments precisely and without seeing error. We learn that his mother, as played by Miranda Richardson, had nicknamed him "Spider" and it is through his newly gained name that his mannerisms take on the skin of the animal. Each newly remembered facet of his world is honed on the impressions of a spider web -- the string, broken glass, the jigsaw puzzle, the string game he plays at the kitchen table -- spiraling and spinning the child and the man into its deadly web and further from reality as we know it.
Richardson portrays three multi-faceted characters in this film, three spirits, and with each one she sheds a skin and grows another, entirely different in bearing and manner. It is a tour de force performance. Gabriel Bryne as Bill Clegg is dark and daunting, shown as a family man bored and tired with the mundance existance that is his life. Or is he?
The performance of Bradley Hall as the young Spider is eerie and precisely on the money. You can feel a kindred spirit between his child Spider and the adult that he is to become in Ralph Fiennes.
The best has been saved for last and that honour belongs to Ralph Fiennes. His Spider is haunted and haunting, gritty and realistic. This crumbling vestige of a man has been finely honed and not once did I think that I was watching a "performance" but rather as true a representation of a schizophrenic as one is able to command. It is not a glamour role or a safe role, not a trace of "pretty boy" about it and thank god, none attempting to project itself from the proceedings! Fiennes, who is known for the research he puts into his roles, has scored all aces with this one.
Another added plus is that Hollywood has not managed to ruin a good thing -- a film that truly makes one THINK about what they have just seen. I cannot help but put another role as a schizophrenic into play -- that of Russell Crowe in "A Beautiful Mind." When you see these two films and attempt to add the similarities, about the only one that comes to mind IS the fact that schizophrenics are being represented and nothing more. Fiennes has left, for all intents and purposes, Crowe's portrayal in the dust, and if Hollywood has any guts come Oscar nomination time, they will credit a true acting triumph, rather than the orchestrated ones that usually win because of huge studio mounted pushes. "Spider" is the little film that could, did and should.
"Spider" is not an easy film to watch, but then seeing madness never is. There are those who will be turned off by it, or perhaps momentarily subjected to moments of quiet. Then again, others will cheer a peformance that is worthy of the accolade, "a job very well done indeed! BRAVO!" Cronenberg, as director, has launched a film that is as subdued and unassuming as a breath of air as it brushes past a cheek. The hollow streets, the absence of crowds and the delicate renderings of cast and crew alike, have conveyed a dream or as some would insist, a nightmare and forsaken a Hollywood beginning, middle and end.
I sincerely hope that "Spider" is not lost in the shuffle of films that will spill forth over the course of the spring, or be considered as "too arthouse" to warrant consideration by other than those who know absolute talent when it is put in front of them. This film is not "entertainment" per se, and that would be the wrong word to use. Rather, eye opening and thought provoking would be a more apt description. It's a step on the edge of the abyss and the eventual and catastrophic conclusion that must become Spider's reality.
It is minimalist and daring and I can't say strongly enough how much this ensemble cast has brought forth for our inspection. See this film and be amazed at it in all its consummate glory!
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