There’s something wrong with Spider, not the least of which is his name. Dubbed so for his love of all things arachnid, Dennis “Spider” Cleg remembers building webs of natty string in his room. He also remembers his father doing something awful to his mother. Actually he remembers quite a lot, it’s just not clear if any of it is true. See, Spider (Ralph Fiennes) is crazy. Not Red Dragon crazy. It’s more like The Chief from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest crazy. He doesn’t say much (about three words over 90 minutes) and this turns out to be the nuttiest thing about Spider, a quiet, tame and ultimately lackluster attempt by director David Cronenberg to shatter his self-constructed mold.
Those who know the Canadian auteur remember him from previous films such as The Fly, Dead Ringers and Crash, each a perfect exemplar of his preoccupations—including kinky transgressive sex and technology’s external effects on the human body. Spider has none of the former and a smidgen of the latter, decidedly interior, but deceptively so. We see inside Spider’s mind, but never with any assurance.
The film opens with Spider stepping onto a London train platform en route to a halfway house for former mental patients. He is schizophrenic, wearing four shirts at once and writing unintelligibly in a small notebook. He walks aimlessly and with great difficulty, always alone. Eventually, these meanderings lead him to his old neighborhood, where childhood memories begin to take life—pub frequenting father (Gabriel Byrne), homebody mother (Miranda Richardson) and the whore (also Richardson) who comes between them. Like a ghost, Spider watches these events inert and unseen. Framed sitting next to his younger self at home, or on the periphery of events he did not witness, Spider is both an active creator of history and the sad shadow of inevitability. Bad things happen and there’s no doubt the kid’s going to go gaga.
Adapted by Patrick McGrath from his novel of the same name, the story suffers in the translation. Where the book gave us access to Spider’s mind (it is written in the first person), the film is impenetrable. We can observe his actions, but with no dialogue there is little connection to the man. This is deliberate, but also signals the inherent difficulty of such a movie as it attempts to keep our attention while conveying an unknowable experience.
With his performance, though, Fiennes tries his hardest. It’s all pantomime, reliant on the slightest of movements—the turn of a foot or twitch of an eye. Fiennes’ voice comes from the core of his throat and reaches his teeth before vanishing at his lips. A bravura performance to be sure, but relentless in its focus and exhausting to watch: he is completely Spider and completely ungraspable. Every story needs a center of stillness to hold it together, but when the center becomes the whole, trouble lingers closely behind.
Miranda Richardson almost saves Spider from itself with her portrayal of three roles: Mrs. Cleg, Vyonne the tart and, late in the film, Mrs. Wilkinson, matron of a halfway house. With a psychological sledgehammer she is mother, whore and disciplinarian, a frightening Freudian literalization that turns every woman he sees into his mum. The range here is stunning, Richardson’s Mrs. Cleg is a prim, sympathetic piece of the film’s scenery that Richardson’s Yvonne devours with glee. She is all prickly teeth and predatory nails, sex as it appears to a child—ugly, frightening and omnivorous.
Cronenberg takes full advantage of the British locale. Everything is damp and on the edge of decay, Spider above all. His nicotine-stained teeth and fingers are as brown as the dirty bath-water he bathes in. The streets of London’s East End are totally devoid of people, day and night, like Spider’s consciousness. A noble attempt to plumb the depths of mental instability, the film is static and unchanging. With little movement of either camera or plot, the opening tracking shot serves as the sum total of the film’s dynamism. Beautiful shots abound in their repose, but are sparse and hard to come by.
A perceptive eye does not a complete movie make, however. We and the protagonist are at the same place at the end as in the beginning, like an oroboros that swallows itself whole. The film’s structure has us move towards revelation as Spider does, coming closer and closer to the reason for his insanity, but when that moment arrives it is unclear and useless. The credits roll only three minutes later and two emotions ring true—confusion and dissatisfaction. The payoff is delivered in so poor a fashion that any hope of comprehension or desire for extended explanations are dashed. At the end, its impossible to care about a man who’s hardly there or a film that barely exists. Spider strains to creep low, but disappears completely under the floorboards instead. Such a fate is inescapable for him, for the director, and for us, a thought more depressing than any other.
