REVIEW (posted 2/27/03)

Contemporary viewers get a good laugh out of the penultimate scene of Psycho, in which a gruff, confident psychiatrist played by Simon Oakland explains to Sam Loomis, Lila Crane, et al. — and the audience — exactly what compelled poor mad Norman Bates to do all those nutty, horrible things, among them brutally stabbing Ms. Crane's sister to death in the shower. Yes, we all chortle when Oakland explains precisely how it is that Bates is not a transvestite, and so on, but as silly as the explanation may seem, and as absurd as the proposition that Bates's evil madness can be so conveniently discoursed away is, the scene does provide some measure of comfort; imagine just how desolate the movie would have been without it.

Actually, you don't have to imagine, because director David Cronenberg's magnificent, bleak Spider takes us into the mind of a madman and tells his life story entirely from his point of view. In the opening shots of the film, a train pulls into a station. Cronenberg's camera holds steady and lets us see the stream of ordinary humanity disembarking; soon enough they're all gone. Only then emerges the tall, slightly stooped, entirely haunted figure of Dennis Cleg (Ralph Fiennes), nicknamed "Spider" by his mother during his childhood because of his fascination with arachnids and their webs. Cleg has been in a facility for the mentally ill, and the train has taken him to London, where he enters a halfway house presided over by the officious, crabbed Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave). It would appear that this halfway house is in the neighborhood where he grew up; the looming gasworks nearby has some significance to him — it's hard to tell precisely why, because Spider, who, among other things, insists on wearing four or five shirts at once, speaks in a terrified mumble, letting bunches of inarticulated words fall from his mouth as he looks down.

And yet this character is the film's narrator, as it were. It's just that the narration isn't verbal, is all. (Apparently, it was in an early version of the script by Patrick McGrath, who adapted it from his own novel.) Spider revisits the pub his father (Gabriel Byrne) used to frequent, and episodes from his past play out in front of him. He then observes his younger self at home, interacting with his beloved mother (Miranda Richardson). Mum tells young Spider to go fetch his dad at the pub; once there, Spider is flashed by a bloated, vulgar tart, who . . . Well, I don't want to give too much away, but it's a crucial point that the actress playing the "actual" flasher is not Richardson. Let's just say that the unreliable narrator is one thing on the printed page; it's something wholly other on the screen. But if anyone can pull off such a trick, it's Cronenberg, and his assuredness seems to grow as Spider's childhood deteriorates.

This masterful movie is as much about mortality as it is about madness, in the same vein as Camera, the devastating short Cronenberg made for the Toronto film festival in 2000. Camera's narrator was a man with more past behind him than probable future in front of him, and while Spider is not an old man, spiritually and mentally he's a closed circuit; in fact, his future ended when he was just a boy, and this movie is the utterly heartbreaking chronicle of how Spider comes to intuit, if not quite face, that fact. Fiennes is amazing in the title role — occasionally I thought how much more interesting Maid in Manhattan would have been had Fiennes been permitted to throw some Spider-isms into his performance there. (But, I figure, if Jennifer Lopez had had any inkling of this film's existence, Fiennes would never have been cast in Maid.) As great as Fiennes is, he is topped by Miranda Richardson, playing a multiform creation of Spider's imagination. That she gives each of her manifestations such reality is one of the reasons the movie is so disturbingly powerful.