(Contributed to 'Blogcritics' as well.) It can be very rewarding to come to a movie with no knowledge of what it's about and few preconceptions apart from an admiration for previous work by the same director.
Especially when the film is far more challenging than you'd expected, needing to be seen twice before the tale unravels with a sinister beauty.
Until the opening scene of 'Spider' (2002)*, though the very promising cast list was a huge clue, I wasn't sure that one of David Cronenberg's finest achievements would be set in England; a story told in a London rarely brought to the screen but immediately recognisable, particularly in the extensive part of the film that takes place in drab streets I often visited in my childhood.
For a while, the plot foxed me completely .
I found 'Spider' on the science fiction and horror shelves, but Dominique, the guy of intriguing and eclectic tastes who runs the video store, agreed that it belongs among the psychological dramas.
A mumbling, shuffling Ralph Fiennes turns in an outstanding performance, from the moment he's the last man off the train, confused and half lost, as a schizophrenic released from a mental institution into a boarding hostel which serves as a halfway house for those who stand a chance of being reintegrated back into society.
In the man's flashbacks, which don't take long to begin, Miranda Richardson is equally superb as his beloved mother, as an ageing, loud-mouthed tart in the pub down the corner, and -- sometimes -- as the stern woman who runs the hostel, mainly played by Lynn Redgrave.
'Spider' is a relentlessly grim murder mystery and the childhood (Bradley Hall, as good as the rest of the cast) nickname for the disturbed Dennis Cleg, who sees his father (Gabrielle Byrne) split his mother's skull with a spade when she finds him having sex at the allotments by the railway with Yvonne.
The boy's mind is right off the rails when dad then brings home the tart who had drunkenly tormented the timid, quiet and friendless Spider by flashing a bare tit in the boy's face when he was sent to the pub by his mum to fetch his dad back for dinner. "I can't believe she done that!" shrieks one of Yvonne's girlfriends amid raucous laughter. That's an easy bit of the constantly colloquial English that would seem, understandably, to have bewildered a number of the Americans whose reviews I found at the IMDb when I had a look this morning.
But why is the released Dennis so obsessed with the monstrous gasworks tank which is about all he can see out of the window from his grubby, crudely furnished room in the hostel?
What is the code, if any, to the strange script Spider painstakingly uses with a pencil as he mumbles his memories, slowly and unreliably coming back to him, into his hidden notebook.
To spare people who know no more than I did about 'Spider', the helpless voyeur fly on the wall throughout almost every recollected scene in the movie, I'll write nothing else of the character study.
Watching this late at night left me saying to myself, "Uggh! That was good, but I don't want to see it again." But after lying in the dark for a while and absorbing it, before my mind maybe went to work while I slept on it, I did.
Now I knew what happens at the end, a second viewing was the only way fully to appreciate the skill Cronenberg exercised in filming a novelist's revision of his work. In an article at 'eye WEEKLY', without spoilers but with insight, Jason Anderson writes that unlike Cronenberg's "controversial adaptations of Crash and Naked Lunch, this movie had a screenwriter (Patrick McGrath, who adapted his 1990 novel) and an actor (Ralph Fiennes) long before it had a director."
It took Anderson's piece (and a sensible word from a Québecois writer, 'man-man-dot-org,' who notes that "the regular IMDB approach of watch-a-movie-write-a-review has done Spider a grave disservice") to remind me to look twice before leaping in.
'Spider' is one of the Canadian director's slowest, darkest and saddest films, much more mature than 'The Dead Zone', which took me by surprise given an unpromising premise.
I would guess, however, that much of the credit for the detailed rightness in Cronenberg's vision of the unhappier parts of the Britain I grew up in -- those dreary clothes, the dads with their allotments and sheds, the language and life of the poorer London streets -- goes to McGrath and to Fiennes and others in the adult cast.
I'm glad I was in a cheerful mood when 'Spider' went into the DVD player last night. It's a demanding film, close to exhausting first time round, before it starts to work on you, making a different contribution to your perceptions of "reality" from 'eXistenZ' but one which is richly worthwhile.
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*My version of the European zone 2 DVD linked here lacked the extras featured on the zone 1 version available in the United States and Canada.
People who can tweak their DVD players appropriately might be interested to check that one out (as with other films), if they plan to spend cash on them.
It scarcely matters regarding bonuses, but I've had occasion to note elsewhere that DVD reviewers on opposite sides of the Pond are occasionally almost writing about two different movies because of the cuts and other changes sometimes inflicted by distributors.
5:13:15 PM link
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