Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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RALPH FIENNES IN SPIDER

Spider creeps into your brain

David Cronenberg's "Spider" is a kind of antidote to the upbeat depiction of madness found in last year's "Beautiful Mind." The latter ends with the crazy man turned into nothing more than a slightly befuddled genius, receiving an honorary delayed Premio Nobel with his loyal wife beside him. "Spider" ends with the isolated, pathetic Dennis Cleg ("Spider," Ralph Fiennes) being taken from a grim halfway house back to the asylum from whence he came. He has not worked out, to put it very mildly.

The "Beautiful Mind" character, John Nash, achieves a semblance of normality. Insanity is something he pops in and out of, like a computer game, and resolves to turn away from by sheer force of will, no thanks to Ed Harris but very much with the help of a good wife (Jennifer Connelly). Dennis Cleg is utterly deranged. Any sort of wife and any sort of life are out of the question for him and always were as the movie gradually explains to us.

"Spider" is more interior. It makes us focus on Cleg and enter his world by following him off a train to the address he's been sent to stay at. He gets there by a slow stumbling shuffle, muttering to himself, stooping over to pick up tiny objects beside puddles in the dingy gritty London streets of Cronenberg's film. "Spider" is a very creepy picture, and Cleg is a very creepy man. "Spider" works almost entirely without special effects and yet like many of Cronenberg's movies it has a hallucinatory, trippy quality from first to last. Nothing could be much trippier than "Naked Lunch" and "eXistenZ" but what makes "Spider" like an eerie dream is the slowness with which it movies. Spider's shuffle compels us to move with him and into his mind.

Cleg is a very, very odd, withdrawn, strange, almost totally uncommunicative creature, living almost certainly more in the past than the present, inhabiting that past doubly--because he cannot get it out of his mind and it also appears now that the halfway house is very near where he lived as a child and he finds his way back to actual sites of the primal scenes that drove him mad (except that clearly he was always mad, or ready to go mad). He inhabits thus in mind and body now in the hallucinatory scenes of the movie this strange childhood, the world of a boy with a mother (Miranda Richardson) and a father (Gabriel Byrne) in a poor working class house in East London. What is going on? We go back again and again to the same scenes: to a pub where tarts smoke and laugh mockingly, where his dad comes in the evening. To the kitchen where he sits with his mum. He is sent back and forth. His father goes with one of the tarts. The boy follows them.

Or does he? Here as in "Beautiful Mind" the protagonist enters the world of his madness before your eyes, but this time we're not fooled for long. Spider scribbles frenzied notes in a hidden journal, trying desperately, it appears, to figure out what his memories mean. The impossibility of his task is shown in the writing, which is gibberish. He lives with a fearful terror, inside multiple shirts, not daring to look anyone in the eye, but he himself is dangerous and doomed.

The boy Cleg is excellent. Not as mannered and creepy as the adult Cleg (a Beckett figure whose performance, excellently done by Fiennes, is mostly dumbshow), he's nonetheless very much like the older Fiennes in the picture, and the young actor, Bradley Hall, is wonderfully understated. He has mannerisms that connect him with the adult Cleg. He plays with little objects, cat's cradles, and has string running across his room like a spider's web, and he picks up bits of smut from the ground and pockets them. He has the same frightened way of mutely staring into space. In retrospect their very eyes seemed the same.

Much credit is due also to another excellent actor, John Neville, as Terrence, the only other inmate of the halfway house that comes into Spider's ken; Miranda Richardson is fine in additional roles. They may seem a bit overdrawn, but then we realize that we are witnessing the hallucinations of an unstable child. All the acting is splendid in this movie.

Cronenberg has created a world in "Spider" that's elaborately decayed and dirty and dripping with moisture. Every object or bare wall is richly patina-ed and ancient, ageless, but the world of the picture is simple and without distractions. Nothing takes your eye off Cleg and his memories or delusions. Cleg moves very deliberately, always hesitating, tentative, withdrawing, withholding. There is no need to overstate horror. It is simply horrible. People will differ on whether this is a great movie. For all its greater integrity and grittiness, it falls prey to the problem of "Beautiful Mind": that we, the sane, cannot know madness, and devices, essentially artificial, must be created to provide us with some substitutes and metaphors for an interior world to which we lack the key. Some of us may feel curiously let down when "Spider" ends without the payoff of a tragedy or a cure. One thinks of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men":

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

But we may find in the days after our viewing that "Spider" has left its stain on our memory.

March 11, 2003

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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