Spider - 2002
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Written by: Patrick McGrath (from his novel)

Starring:
Ralph Fiennes - "Spider" Cleg
Miranda Richardson - Mrs. Cleg/Yvonne/Mrs. Wilkinson
Gabriel Byrne - Bill Cleg
John Neville - Terrence
Bradley Hall - Young Spider

suppose I should confess going in that I am a devoted fan of David Cronenberg's movies. In my opinion, he is one of the finest, most talented directors ever to say "action." He is one of the few directors whom I think deserves to be called an artist — if he were making movies for the money, he wouldn't be making the kind of movies he makes. Each is a very dark and personal vision, so personal that I always walk away from them with the feeling that I've just been shown something private, secret, something I wasn't supposed to see. Spider is no different.

Spider is a difficult movie to describe, and even if it weren't, I don't think I'd tell you very much about it. Watching it, we don't exactly follow a narrative as it unfolds, we instead absorb the movie and its characters while we sit in a kind of trance induced by the film. The entire story is told through the very subjective eyes of "Spider" Cleg (Ralph Fiennes). We don't know if what we're seeing is a childhood memory, or a fantasy conjured up by Spider's mental illness.

When we first see Spider, he comes off a train looking like a concentration camp victim. He looks like he's scorched inside, burnt out, nearly crippled by inner torment. In layers of old clothes, his pain worn clearly on his face, he shuffles along and mumbles to himself as he reaches into his pants and pulls out a sock filled with some of his possessions — the rest are in an old suitcase. From the sock, he removes a slip of paper with an address written on it. On his way there, he passes a building with windows that have been bricked up — not unlike Spider himself, whom we learn is trapped inside his own head with all his windows on the world outside bricked up. He finds the address and is taken in by the landlady, Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave), who has been expecting him. Spider has just been released from a mental hospital. Mrs. Wilkinson runs a halfway house, where Spider meets an old man named Terrence (John Neville). Terrence babbles on about Africa and scorpions, and like Spider, his face is a mask of misery.

"It is a loud world," he tells Spider. "And this is an island — but an island ruled by a tyrant queen."

Spider is so busy wandering through the landscape of his childhood, he hardly notices Mrs. Wilkinson or her tenants. He revisits long talks with his mother, silent glares from his father, and a horrible crime. But is this really his childhood, or is it a creation of his illness?

As I type this, the cineplexes in my hometown and yours are filled with loud, simple-minded movies that contain lots of explosions and/or vulgar behavior and little or no sense, most of which appear to have been edited in a Cuisinart. Spider, now available on DVD, is an oasis in the sea of blockbuster prequels and sequels. Its pace is slow throughout, but it is not boring for a second — the pace is set by the halting rhythms of Spider himself. Like all of Cronenberg's films, it presumes the viewer is intelligent enough to follow the movie without being beaten over the head. It's very quiet, a dark and expressionistic dream that finally becomes a nightmare before releasing us from the trance.

In the DVD commentary, Cronenberg says he avoided accurately portraying Spider as a schizophrenic — he did no research at all on the subject — because he thought the label would distance the audience from him. He wanted to make the audience "become Spider," he says, rather than dismissing him as someone who's mentally ill. That's why the words "schizophrenia" and "mental illness" are never spoken. "The movie is not a clinical study of schizophrenia," he says. "It is a study of the human condition when it's pushed to a particular extreme. So, it's a philosophical study rather than a medical one."

I haven't seen everything Ralph Fiennes has done, but of what I've seen, his performance in Spider is his best. He makes Spider so vivid and draws us in so close that we feel as if we are looking through his eyes, as if we share his smothering illness. Just as Cronenberg wanted, Fiennes's performance allows us to become Spider, whether we want to or not.

Lynn Redgrave is a wonderful character actress who elevates everything in which she appears. She plays Mrs. Wilkinson as a chilly, impatient woman who perhaps regrets her decision to go into the halfway house business. John Neville is memorable as Terrence, whose face sharply registers his pain and fear. If Gabriel Byrne has ever given a weak performance, I haven't seen it — even in 1999's awful End of Days, Byrne was outstanding — and that remains true for his work here.

But it is Miranda Richardson who knocks herself out by playing three roles, and being utterly convincing in all of them. I'm not going to tell you who these characters are, or why I think Cronenberg used one actress in all three — that is for you to discover.

Spider is challenging and disturbing, a movie that splinters and gets under the skin in slivers. Like all great movies, it gives us something to talk about after the closing credits. It makes us want to watch it again to figure out how Cronenberg did it — and it's the kind of movie that will hold up with multiple viewings.

The fact that all the great performances in Spider, as well as Cronenberg's razor-sharp direction, were ignored by the Academy when Oscar time rolled around is proof that the Academy Awards are not to be taken seriously.

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