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| Spider |
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  (8/10)
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Runtime: 98 |
| Public Rating: 9.07 (14 votes) |
Director: David Cronenberg |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: thriller, drama |
Year: 2002 |
| Writer(s): Patrick McGrath (novel and screenplay) |
| Distributor: Buena Vista Int'l, Sony Picture Classics |
| Reviewed by: Avril Carruthers |
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Produced by Catherine Bailey, David Cronenberg, Samuel Hadida,
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Lynn Redgrave, John Neville, Bradley Hall.
“Ralph Fiennes makes us care for this fractured soul simply by the way he stands in the street.”
The power of David Cronenberg’s work to shock, disgust and thrill can hardly be disputed. With high calibre horror Sci-Fi movies such as The Fly, Naked Lunch, and eXistenZ this talented Canadian director has never shrunk from showing us the visceral truths underlying our everyday reality. In Spider he has shifted from the realms of fantasy and sci-fi to the murky depths of a disturbed mind.
A delicate piano solo from Howard Shore sets the mood in the opening credits, which are overlaid on Rorschach-type paintings suggestive of butterflies, chrysalids and spider-like insects. It’s very much Cronenberg’s trademark, the symbolic sepia griminess of it all, and the paintings are not clearly defined. It’s the impressionistic territory of mental instability, all black eyes and proboscises, no mouths. It’s where transformation and "becoming" are not according to archetype, but distorted and deformed.
Then we’re on a train platform, the train disgorging lots of very normal people in a hurry, meeting others or on their way to somewhere important. We know because of the hovering camera that he’ll be the very last. He’s a shell of a person, hidden so far inside himself that when he steps onto the platform it’s doubtful he’ll connect with the concrete. He looks totally alone in his world. Compounding his weird look, he reaches inside his crotch and pulls out a sock, in which is an address on a bit of paper. He’s muttering unintelligibly, then we hear snatches of it. He’s saying the address over and over to himself.
Ralph Fiennes plays Spider, a man whose inner reality is so overwhelming and whose sense of self is so fractured that he can only take in very small amounts from the outside at a time. As he walks he finds significance in small discarded objects, piece of paper, bits of string and stones, almost like he is mutely greeting old friends.
He gets to his destination, a halfway house for people who’ve been institutionalised in a mental asylum. It’s close to where he grew up and gradually his daily excursions into that environment bring him undone once more. We are with him as he connects, thread by tantalising thread, what happened in his childhood to crack his mind into schizophrenia. There are a few blind alleys, false leads and misdirections. As the mystery unfolds, however, we find it’s the emerging schizophrenia in the young Spider which was a direct cause of the central tragedy of his life. That in turn spirals him into a pit from which there is no return.
There is no beautiful mind in this portrait of a person with a certain kind of schizophrenia. There are powerful, barely-lit scenes of Spider in his bleak room, fully dressed under his overcoat, as he writes minutely in code in his diary. He is terrified of the gas fire which remains unlit and which he sniffs suspiciously. He stands to write, resting on the tall chest of drawers. He mutters to himself and hides the diary with infinite care so it will not be discovered by the cold, unsympathetic caretaker, Mrs Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave). A mystery to himself, it is only a fellow resident, Terence (John Neville) who understands his existential situation. When Mrs Wilkinson complains about all the shirts Spider is wearing simultaneously, Terence explains with the literal logic of the schizophrenic mind, “Clothes maketh the man. The less there is of the man the more there is need of the clothes.”
Interwoven with these scenes are his revisitations to his childhood. Far more real than his present life, and utterly chilling, we see the adult Spider standing in the corner of the kitchen of his childhood, watching himself as a child with his father (Gabriel Byrne) and mother (Miranda Richardson). We see the reason he is called Spider, and the significance of the string he collects. It is an environment with frequent raw violence based on the instincts of fear, self-preservation and desire.
Gabriel Byrne as the father emanates the kind of rapacious and violent menace an Oedipal protagonist should, with one intriguing exception which, being totally out of character, gives us pause to doubt that what we are seeing is what has happened. Miranda Richardson embraces with spirit the diverse roles of literally all women. Ralph Fiennes is superb as Spider, making us care for him early on simply by the way he stands in the street, and without speaking more than half a dozen words in the entire movie.
The film explores issues of a child’s idealisation of his mother and how he deals with the situation when her behaviour deviates from that ideal. The simple device of having all the female roles taken over by Miranda Richardson shows the child’s first split with reality but creates equal mystery in the viewer as to what is really happening. The suspense leading to the climax has all the horror of knowing something dreadful will happen and being powerless to avert it, just as the young (and adult) Spider does, watching helplessly from the present as his past unravels all its tangled web, leaving him unsafe once more.
A sad tale, so masterfully told that by the end, we understand it from inside the mind of Spider.
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