Spider Review
by Balaji Srinivasan (balaji_cheenu AT yahoo DOT com)November 30th, 2004
Review: Spider (2002)
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne. Directed by David Cronenberg.
*** (out of 4)
The opening shot of the film is set in a train station in London. A train arrives; the camera wades through all the people who are leaving the train and slowly inches its way through. After a minute, a frail man, Dennis Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) disembarks with a great deal of difficulty, muttering to himself. The next scene, we see him landing up in a half-way house (he has been released from a mental institution). To get to that place, he takes a couple of minutes, walking slowly, mumbling incomprehensible things and showing all signs of a mentally ill person. At this point, you are either hooked on to the character and would enjoy the rest of the movie, or you are not, in which case you are in for a tedious, dull movie.
Spider is a film by David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers) based on a novel by Patrick McGrath. It is a very complex study of character of a man who is very ill. Dennis Cleg, we come to know, has fleeting memories of his childhood; The movie goes back and forth between his current life and his childhood - between the real and the imaginary - between what may have happened and what we believe that Dennis Cleg is hallucinating about, and so on. The exploration of the psyche of this person is meticulously done, a bit too meticulous for my taste.
It is difficult to discuss the movie without giving much away; be rest assured that if you follow the movie in detail, there is a sharp twist at the end that will clear up a whole lot. Dennis' mother (Miranda
Richardson) and father (Gabriel Byrne) have a dysfunctional relationship. The child is a loner and is filled with oedipal tendencies. The father is a plumber and gets involved with a local prostitute. The child worships his mom and does not like the father who is breaking the relationship. Things go downhill from then on, which is not a surprise because we know the current state of the child
- an emotionally tarnished wreck who is crumbling into pieces.
The mood of the film is dark and dreary. Every psychological cliche is allured to, right from Oedipal complex, to classic symptoms of schizophrenia. The film doesn't mention schizophrenia or other illnesses that Dennis may have, but leaves them to the viewer to figure it all out. Broken glass windows, bare walls and dingy rooms, an intricate segue into a spider's web imagery, are all in full display to convey the psychological breakdown of the man. One can probably notice all this in a second viewing.
When I saw this for the first time, I was only trying to figure out which scenes were real and which were figments of his imagination. I finally got it right only towards the end of the movie when more things are revealed to the viewer. Such enormously laid out puzzles work in a few films, only when the screenplay moves on and is able to engage the viewer on its own merit. Here, that is not the case. The screenplay is dull and boring and fails to engage the viewer.
Ralph Fiennes excels in his lead role and portrays the mental trauma of Dennis well. It is not an easy character to portray; there are hardly any lines for him in the movie, and much is conveyed by body language and facial expressions. Fiennes has shown that he can do a wide range of characters, from the hawkish General in Schindler's list to three different roles in Sunshine. Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne give ample support. Miranda in particular, plays a huge role as the mother in both the real and the imagined scenes and brings out the contrast well.
The film finally ends up as a well laid out whodunit wrapped in a Freudian case study wrapped in a non-linear narrative. That alone is not enough to sustain interest in this film. The screenplay fails to involve the viewer emotionally in this probe into the darkest corners of the mind.
- Balaji Srinivasan.
http://balaji.yi.org/blog/
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