Spider

TIFF [2002]

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(CANADA/UK/FRANCE 2002)
Directed by David Cronenberg
Written by Patrick McGrath, based upon his novel
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Bradley Hall, John Neville, Lynn Redgrave

The other highly anticipated Canadian entry into this year’s festival, David Cronenberg’s “Spider”, may have lost the Opening Night Gala slot to Atom Egoyan’s “Ararat”, but it was honoured with the Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film. The North American premiere screening drew mixed reaction from the audience, but would one expect anything less from a director who has never backed away from controversy or the opportunity to challenge his viewers’ expectations, even at the expense of box office dollars and the all important “R” rating?

If the execution will confound some, the basic story itself is simple: In what is presumably present day London, Dennis Clegg (Fiennes) returns home after been released from an asylum and checks into an East End halfway house. A gaunt, muttering chain smoker clad in drab layers and flinching at the most minimal human contact, Clegg prefers to scribble in his journal in his attic room, and more so, to ruminate before a riverside gasworks from a park bench. It is in these solitary moments that Clegg recalls an abusive, impoverished home childhood with an alcoholic father (Byrne) and neglected mother (Richardson) and a horrific act that drove him to madness.

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At first glance, the above synopsis might suggest a Film Four kitchen-sink reality piece ala Mike Leigh or Terence Davies, but in Clegg’s accounts, reality, fantasy, and false memory blur—he recalls his father murdering his mother and replacing her with a local tramp, but how much can we believe when this wicked stepmother, and eventually his landlady (Redgrave), all appear to be the same person (Richardson again, and again)?

Filtered through Cronenberg’s sensibility, McGrath’s sometimes hallucinatory, Freud-heavy confessional is reinvented as yet another continuation of the director’s usual obsessions: dual identities (“Scanners”, “Dead Ringers”, “Existenz”), sexual confusion and revulsion (“M Butterfly”, “Crash”), and the unreliable narrator (“Naked Lunch”). Clegg also interacts with his memories/flashbacks, reminiscent of Christopher Walken appearing in his visions in “The Dead Zone”.

Fiennes accomplishes a difficult acting challenge in crafting a character almost entirely through gesture and reaction—at times I was reminded of Conrad Veidt’s skeletal Cesare from “Caligari, as well as Peter Lorre’s tortured “M”. In McGrath’s prose, Clegg narrates and thus, never shuts up, and yet on film, he barely utters a word (narration rarely works for me in a movie-- see “Auto Focus” elsewhere in this overview--here, Cronenberg wisely avoids it).

Returning in top form is Cronenberg’s repertory company of creative talent: cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, editor Ronald Sanders, and composer Howard Shore (production designer Andrew Sanders replaces longtime collaborator Carol Spier). Because the “horror” here is more personal, the overall production is less overtly stylized and more organic, reminiscent, perhaps, of David Lynch’s “Eraserhead”, right down to the decaying textures, Expressionistic lighting, and especially, the ominous industrial backdrop (the gasworks),

Low-key to the point of inertia, “Spider” might seem to some like a too-extreme rebound from the Hollywood temptations that brought David Cronenberg very close to directing a sequel to “Basic Instinct”. However, nearly thirty years into his feature career, Cronenberg has grown from Canada’s “King Of Venereal Horror” to something of a master in adapting “unfilmable” novels to the screen, and patient viewers will be drawn into this mannered first person study in madness and “rubber reality” that’s as far from the tidy histrionics of mainstream melodramas “A Beautiful Mind” as “Dead Ringers” was from “Twins”.

- Robert L

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