Spider Review
by Shane Burridge (sburridge AT hotmail DOT com)April 22nd, 2003
Spider (2002) 98m
You may be haunted by David Cronenberg's intensive adaptation of Patrick McGrath's novel, written for the screen by McGrath himself. Certainly that's the state that 'Spider' Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) is in from start to finish. Forget other emotive dramatizations of schizophrenia, paranoia, and mental illness that you might have seen on screen previously: this is one of the closest verisimilitudes of insanity you're likely to see. There are no lurid hallucinations or sequences that pretend to be real and then suddenly reveal themselves as imaginary, no element of conspiracy or a struggle between the institution and the institutionalized, and no jumping from the mind of the psychotic to the real world. To a hardened case of paranoid schizophreni everything is real, and that is the thrust of SPIDER. It is a film that can be viewed a second time with a different perspective, without having the feeling of being 'cheated' the first time around.
As Spider, Fiennes plays the most shattered character I think I've ever seen in a film. He is barely intelligible, moving as if breaking under an invisible weight. Everything is a labor to him. The only thing he appears to do easily is assemble jigsaw puzzles, which become an externalization of his elusive, broken past. At first glance it doesn't seem likely that there's going to be any closure for Fiennes' character, but there's an indefatigable element to Spider which keeps him weaving impenetrable but purposeful patterns. Our first glimpse of him as a child is when he is making a cat's cradle ("Aren't you clever," his mother remarks), a setup for a series of flashbacks that will follow. By storytelling conventions these should show us what happened in Cleg's childhood to send him on the road to madness, but in SPIDER they cannot be taken at face value (it's even more confusing in the novel). At the end we have to accept the uncomfortable possibility that children do not become insane because of any conveniently-timed trauma, but that they are already insane without anyone knowing. There's a neat collision of different motifs in the film when an asylum director places the last, bloodstained shard of glass into a reassembled window pane, in effect setting an implement of murder/suicide into a jigsaw that resembles a spiderweb. It foreshadows the film's revelation – yes, there is one – when Spider brandishes a murder weapon, recalling a deadly web he once wove, and sees the last piece of the puzzle fall in place.
As with other Cronenberg films, SPIDER will not draw a mass audience (I was happy to see it in the director's home town of Toronto). Those who are mesmerized will be matched in number with those who tire of it halfway through. Our attention depends on Fienne's unique performance, and he is ably supported by Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson (Cleg's parents) and particularly the Dickensian boarding house supervisor played by Lynn Redgrave. With not one special effect to be seen, this is an actor's picture that is yet another new path for Cronenberg. Don't expect to see his trademark mutations this time around: as the director's pictures go, SPIDER is certainly light years removed from THE FLY.
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