Thursday, April 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Ralph Fiennes is a shambling schizo in Spider

By Jeannette Catsoulis

"We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live...to fend off madness and chaos."--David Cronenberg

Watching a horribly miscast Ralph Fiennes limply pursue J. Lo in the excruciating Maid in Manhattan, one had to remind oneself that the man is capable of great performances--even if, until now, we've seen only two examples (Schindler's List and Quiz Show). David Cronenberg's Spider raises that total to three, which doesn't sound like much until you realize it beats the records of Tom Cruise and Kevin Costner combined.

Fiennes is one of those effete British actors who can trace his lineage to Leslie Howard in Gone With the Wind. Smooth, cultured, intellectually distant and not entirely comfortable in lustful situations, he is best suited to roles that do not call for active heterosexual behavior. Whether cowering before a strapping Kristin Scott Thomas in The English Patient, or quaking masochistically under Cate Blanchett's reproving gaze in Oscar and Lucinda, Fiennes' handling of rampant female desire has always been awkward. To that extent, then, the part of Dennis "Spider" Cleg could not be more perfect--a shuffling schizophrenic so begrimed and peculiar it's clear from the outset that whatever experiences lie in store for him, romance will not be one of them.

We first meet Spider--so called because of his childhood habit of fashioning webs from scraps of string--as he slides furtively from a train, clutching a battered suitcase and the address of a seedy halfway house. Newly released from the East London mental institution where he has spent the past 20 years, Spider gives every impression that his freedom has been gained prematurely. Muttering incoherently, he cowers in his dingy bedroom, scrawling gibberish in a greasy notebook.

But as Spider haunts the streets of his childhood his interior monologue becomes more feverish and flashbulbs of memory pop in his head. In some, his mother (Miranda Richardson) is a genteel housewife, making dinner for Spider's plumber father, Bill (Gabriel Byrne). In others, Mum has been usurped by Yvonne (also played divinely by Richardson), a trashy blonde who hangs out in bars and copulates enthusiastically with Bill in his garden shed. Bill himself is a loving father who tries to connect with his distant son--or a violent hard case more interested in booze and loose women. Which scenario is real becomes a shockingly urgent question when a brutal murder disrupts the swamp of Spider's unraveling mind.

Screenwriter Patrick McGrath, who adapted the film from his own novel, was raised on the grounds of England's largest insane asylum (where his father was medical superintendent) and his observations of the clinically disturbed give the film a queasy authenticity. With minimum dialogue, Fiennes has extrapolated a mumbling, secretive soul who wears four stained shirts at once and keeps his most prized possessions in a filthy sock stuffed down the front of his pants. It's an incredible, inward-facing performance that haunts as much as it disturbs.

Spider is a perfectly designed meditation on the reverberations of childhood trauma and the irresistible need to know the truth. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky and production designer Andrew Sanders have fashioned a decaying, esthetically bereft world of peeling paint and cracked linoleum, lifeless streets and hopeless humanity. Here everything looks nicotine-stained, beauty is an unobtainable luxury and truth alters moment by moment.

Boasting neither special effects nor rampant sexual symbolism, Spider may confuse Cronenberg fans who anticipate the maestro's signature, stomach-churning style. Yet the director's familiar themes of disease and degeneration remain firmly in evidence; it's just that this time the horror, like Spider's sickness, is all on the inside.