Also this issue: Wide Open Spaces Frederick Wiseman's documentaries give reality time to breathe. -Sam Adams Interview: David Cronenberg -S.A Backwards Thinking Irréversible's reverse philosophy undoes the logic of vengeance. -Cindy Fuchs Screen Picks -Sam Adams New Continuing Repertory Film Showtimes

March 13-19, 2003

movies

Web Pierce

Oh, what a tangled web: Ralph Fiennes as Spider's deranged (but dreamy) madman.

Spider delves into a madman's mind, but leaves the door open a crack.

by Sam Adams

Watching Spider is like being trapped in a lacquered box with something nasty; try as you might to focus your apprehensions, you can't help but be distracted by the beauty of your surroundings. Though we start out watching Spider (Ralph Fiennes), a shambling, mumbling madman, from the outside as he roams the deserted London streets, trying to recall his childhood past, it soon becomes clear that David Cronenberg means to merge the audience's mind with his, in one of those messy processes that, in his movies, normally takes place on screen. At first, it might seem that Spider's merely wandered, unobserved, up to the window of a modest house, but it turns out he's watching his own past: his father (Gabriel Byrne), mother (Miranda Richardson) and even himself (Bradley Hall).

In the present day, where he inhabits a Dickensian halfway home run by the martinet Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave), Spider is a filthy sight, clad in a dirty overcoat and layers of button-down shirts that contain his only possessions -- bits of string and metal, mainly, but also a notebook that he periodically fills with illegible scrawl, guarded as if it contains the secrets of the universe. He fills the air, too, with mumbles that only rarely erupt into words. But as a child, he's a quiet, reactive boy, already silently constructing a world inside his head, just as he festoons his room with webs of ratty twine.

Such construction is key to Spider, which suggests that memory is more a work in progress than an open book. (The script, adapted from his own novel by Patrick McGrath, is full of allusions to puzzles, like the shattered asylum window that's put back together piece by piece in the head psychiatrist's office.) The pieces of Spider's memory eventually fall into a archetypically Freudian pattern, embellished with tricks of light and multiple personalities. (This review, for one, will say no more.) But no matter how lurid the drama becomes, Peter Suschitzky's camera stays at a cool resolve; we're less inside his mind than right alongside him, watching him swim through delusion while we breathe clean air from the surface. Cronenberg's icy control, so perfect for a movie like Dead Ringers (or even the underrated eXistenZ), seems to work against the movie's very reason for being.