The Mother and the Whore

Spider, the latest film from David Cronenberg, is Psycho on Prozac: a strange, slow, moody drama about a deranged man with a mother fixation, and it may not begin to work on you until after it's over. It takes a long time getting started, and that does work against it a bit; about 20 minutes in, a guy in back of me muttered "So far I'm enthralled" to his wife, who I suspect dragged him to see it. "Shut up," I muttered, but I could kind of see his point, as I was doing a little seat-shifting as well. Cronenberg wants to put us in the drab, hazy, suffocating world of his lead character, Dennis -- played by Ralph Fiennes, doing his studied level best to create another kind of English patient -- and he sacrifices little to audience comfort.

Dennis has just been released from an asylum into some kind of a group home for the aged or mentally ill, run with an iron hand by a stiff-backed Nurse Ratched type with a menacing perm (Lynn Redgrave). We don't know much about Dennis except that he has some sort of deranged obsessive-compulsive disorder: he mumbles incoherently, writes unreadable scribbles in a notebook which no one could possibly read but which he carefully hides anyway, wears four or five shirts at the same time, uses twine to weave a web in his room, and is clearly tortured by something in his past we can't quite fathom.

The past kicks in. The adult Dennis begins recalling scenes from his childhood, and rather literally wanders about in them: a deranged, unshaven, ill-kempt sod watching his well-groomed and proper eight or nine year old self from 30 years earlier. His home life growing up is one of those dull, sad, working-class English ones, where his long-suffering, slightly dumpy mother (Miranda Richardson) sends him the grimy local pub to fetch his grumpy, put-upon dad (Gabriel Byrne); while he's there, a low-life tramp viciously bares her tit at him. As scenes of home are played out, Dennis -- nicknamed "Spider" by his mother -- watches the up and down cycle of his parent's marriage: squabbling and making up; fighting and then later having a night on the town. A patchy story emerges, of a loving mother who is trying to hold her family together despite the wandering eye of a blustery, bitter dad. Suddenly the past, in Dennis's reconstruction of it, takes a hairpin turn: his dad kills his mother, and brings home a tramp who looks a good deal like the one Dennis saw in the bar, only this time she is played by Miranda Richardson.

The story, of course, now looks shaky, as the dad simply buries the mother's corpse with the help of his new girlfriend; there's nothing rational about this memory, no report of a missing person or police involvement. As Dennis remembers it, his dear mom was merely killed by his bastard father and replaced by an ill-bred cockney slut with bad teeth.

Of course, there is more to it than this, and the challenge of watching it is figuring out just what the "real" story is, of separating Dennis' real memories from his false one, the one which he has constructed, like a spider's stratagem, as a psychological self-defense. I'll confess I didn't really, really get the whole story until I had coffee this morning and was replaying it in my head, at which point I recalled a key scene. I'm thinking of going back tomorrow evening before it leaves town to see if I had it right. It's the kind of torpid film which probably improves on a second viewing.

All this is, of course, right up Cronenberg's alley, who does a typically good job at putting you in a dislocated world, this time focusing constantly on feet, as if even the adult Dennis is still seeing things from a child's-eye view. Miranda Richardson, in the dual role, does her usual excellent job. I was less impressed with Fiennes. You know how mental patient roles go: there are two kinds, ones where you forget the guy is acting, and ones -- like Fiennes' -- where you couldn't forget if you tried. He has the wild eyes and the involuntary breathing down, but the story moved me more than he did. The real points here go to Patrick McGrath's script (from his novel) and the slow build of Cronenburg's pacing, which does, indeed, enthrall. It just takes its sweet time getting there.