I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

SPIDER

Yesterday, I saw the new David Cronenberg movie, Spider, a Cronenberg movie without all the usual weird prosthetics. Hmm... there's not much I can say about this movie without giving a lot away, so I will... be warned.

Dennis "Spider" Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) has just been released from an insane asylum and travels to a half-way house (facing one of those imposing gas-storage tanks you see all over Britain) run by the authoritarian Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave). He's schizophrenic, and 90% of his dialogue is him mumbling either incoherently or barely coherently. He's insane to the point of obsessively keeping a diary in which he writes everything in a weird code of letters and other non-letter symbols (well, at least he updates his diary a little more regularly than I do this blog...). He decides to visit his home and other important places from his childhood in east London, and, from then, most of the movie is told in flashbacks to his childhood, with him standing around in the background as "events" from his childhood play out before him. His doting mother, Mrs. Cleg (Miranda RIchardson) is the centre of his world, while he seems to resent his plumber father Bill Cleg (Gabriel Byrne), who always seems to be at the bar rather than home. "Spider" hates going to the bar, especially since the hookers hang out there. One of the hookers, Yvonne, is seeing his father behind his mother's back. Meanwhile, in the present, "Spider" starts seeing Mrs. Wilkinson as an older version of Yvonne... is she hiding something from him? One day, Mrs. Cleg catches Bill having sex with Yvonne in his shed, so Bill just kills his wife and then acts as if nothing had happened, with the hooker Yvonne assuming the role of "Spider"'s mother. Or did anything happen? I think the key to understanding this movie is that only the flashbacks where the young "Spider" is present actually happened; "Spider" couldn't possibly know exactly what his father does when "Spider"'s not around, so, many of the flashbacks are just delusions. I thought the shots of the gas-storage tanks were foreshadowing that it would explode in the end... I was about half-correct in that it was indeed foreshadowing something, but not in the way I expected.

The movie is very dark and very atmospheric and very well-acted, I must say. Blues and institutional greens dominate throughout the film, but the colour scheme seemed to be due to wardrobe and set-design and lighting, not those artificial-looking post-production computer-added colour effects I find overused and sometimes hideous in films like Traffic and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, so definetely props for acheiving a consistent colour scheme the proper way. One thing about this movie was that you never quite see the point exactly where "Spider"'s mind snapped and he became schizophrenic, and that's a minor complaint, the schizophrenia itself was very well-handled. It's a very good film, but the opposite of a feel-good movie, and, as such, I don't think I'll watch this again for a long time. ****/*****

posted by Steve Brandon @ 4:28 AM