Spider

As much as anything else, the film is an exploration of family relationships from a limited, untrustworthy perspective. Oedipal overtones all over the place, as Spider is fixated on and repulsed by his mother’s sexuality; he confuses himself with his father in the scene by the canal, confusing his father’s oversexed mistress with his pure mother; finally perhaps realizing his repressed fantasy when Mrs. Wilkinson frisks him looking for her keys. Spider is a grown man who has never properly dealt with his childhood issues with sexuality, and they linger in his every memory and haunt him in every woman he meets. Notice that scene by the canal; it is exactly as a child would imagine it: a simple handjob, over in an instant, with cartoon sex faces and exaggerated moaning. This scene is a great example of how we learn to distrust Spider’s point of view, and how brilliant and multi-faceted the acting and script really are.

The most frequent criticism I’ve read against this film is that it’s ‘boring.’ It is indeed slowly paced, light on dialogue and nearly devoid of action, relying on Howard Shore’s sparse and haunting score and pitch-perfect acting to carry along the momentum and set the tone. I think the slow pace reflects the pace of Spider’s own mind — deliberate, brooding and cautious — serving to draw the audience in to his world even more. I suppose if many people find this pacing boring, Cronenberg didn’t fulfill this objective well. But I for one was mesmerized by it.

It’s hard to decide whether a movie is predictable or not when you yourself accurately predicted it. Halfway or two-thirds through, I was pretty well convinced of what was going on here, what the ‘true’ sequence of events was, and how the characters fit into Spider’s reality. But I still feel it is an intricate, complex story with quite a lot to sift through before any conclusions can be drawn — and the truth is, there’s really nothing to prove the end is the end at all.

Fiennes, Richardson, Byrne and Redgrave are all brilliant and perfect for their roles. Richardson in particular, although I fear explaining why would spoil too much of the plot. Byrne describes this as the most difficult role he’s ever played, because the majority of the time he’s not playing his character at all but a child and an insane man’s fantasy of him. It’s a difficult balance to reach and really speaks to the immense talent of both Richardson and Byrne that they can develop both three-dimensional characters and the alternately over-the-top and simplified charicatures Spider saw and invented.

Ultimately, this is a first-rate film that really gets under your skin if you invest yourself in the character and the multifaceted story as it unfolds.