One Good Film: "Spider"

A regular feature for Watch List subscribers: I suggest one reasonably under-the-radar movie from the recent or distant past, and you do what you want with that information.

With a new Ralph Fiennes movie in theaters – the barnstorming 12-Angry-Cardinals drama "Conclave" – opening in theaters on Friday (my WaPo review is below the paywall and at the newspaper's website), talk of the actor's long-overdue Best Actor Oscar is once again firing up. I expect he'll be nominated for his role as Father Thomas Lawrence, dean of the Vatican's College of Cardinals, but it's an internalized performance and all the better for it, not the kind of actorly showboating the Academy likes to honor. Father Lawrence is a man weighed down by duty and by doubt as he oversees the election of a new pope, and it's a testimony to Fiennes' skill that he holds your attention even with all the great hams acting their motivations off around him as ambitious prelates vying for the Papacy: Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini as a head nun who's fed up with the whole misogynistic bunch. As I say in my review, it's a big old Dad Book of a movie, and a lot of fun if you're in the mood for Catholic cloak-and-dagger, but the only one keeping it honest and on keel is Fiennes, the most self-effacing movie star we've got.

For what it's worth, he's been Oscar-nominated twice, a best supporting actor nod for his breakthrough role as the Nazi villain in "Schindler's List" (1993) and a best actor nomination for "The English Patient" in 1996. But you probably have your list of finest Fiennes performances – feel free to list them in the comments below – and I have mine. They certainly include Monsieur Gustave, concierge supreme, in Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" (2014), the fatally flawed Charles Van Doren in "Quiz Show" (1994), the sorrowful psycho-chef of "The Menu" (2022), the garrulous unwanted guest of "A Bigger Splash" (2015), the black-eyed rat catcher of the short film " The Rat Catcher" (2023), the beleaguered film director of "Hail, Caesar!" (2016), the close-mouthed but deeply romantic amateur archaelogist of "The Dig" (2021) and his Charles Dickens, brilliant and cruel, in "The Invisible Woman" (2013), which Fiennes also directed. Toss in his Lord Voldemort in the "Harry Potter" series if you want; anyone could have played the role without a nose but no one else could have made it so majestically malignant. (Click the links above, by the way, if you want a highly enjoyable cook's tour of the Fiennes filmography.)

And allow me to give a special shout-out to 2002's "Spider" (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, newly arrived on Amazon Prime Video, for rent on Amazon and Apple TV), a David Cronenberg movie that everyone forgets Cronenberg made and Fiennes starred in. For a good reason, I suppose: Portraying the world of a schizophrenic from inside the schizophrenic's head, "Spider" is a challenging puzzle-box of a movie that hews close to the avant-garde, but any attention you give it is rewarded by the subtlety and sympathy – the bone-deep sadness – of the central performance. Given the director's and actor's reputations, the film was greeted with high expectations in 2002, which promptly dissolved upon viewing because it's, you know, difficult. But not so difficult that I can't recommend it. On the contrary, if you want to see Fiennes tackle one of his most demanding roles and bring it to an audience's understanding on trembling hands, "Spider" is a web to become ensnared in.

Here's what I wrote about the film when it premiered in Boston in 2003.

“Spider” arrives on long wings of hype. The drumbeats have been sounding since the Cannes Film Festival last May: it's director David Cronenberg’s finest film, star Ralph Fiennes’s riskiest role, a tour de force for actress Miranda Richardson. The film trotted around the international festival circuit, received a brief Los Angeles theatrical release in December to qualify for Oscar nominations – no luck, too strange – and finally, a good 10 months after it debuted at Cannes, “Spider” skitters into Boston area theaters.

The first thing you need to do is recalibrate your expectations. "Spider" is, in fact, a marvel, but it's also prickly, slow, withdrawn, and small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Cronenberg is working on a jeweler's scale here: Imagine a hand-carved box that resists being pried open, and whose contents are finally revealed to be both dangerous and terribly sad.

The film's source, Patrick McGrath's 1990 novel of the same name, featured the ultimate in unreliable narrators: it was a tale of schizophrenia told from the point of view of the schizophrenic. In adapting his book to film, McGrath puts us on the outside looking in, and all the novel's baroque language is replaced by the unnerving sight of Ralph Fiennes shuffling and mumbling like the mental patient his character is.

His name is Dennis Cleg -- called "Spider" as a child for his fascination with their webs -- and he has just been released to a halfway house in a dank section of East London, not far from where he grew up. The time seems to be the late 1940s. There is a painfully beautiful shot early on of a crowd dismbarking from a train, going about their day, and revealing as they disperse the lone, baffled figure of the title character, paralyzed in his private world. Very slowly, the film lets us inside Spider's madness.

Is that madness pathetic or violent? It's Cronenberg's and Fiennes's achievement that we come to see how one flows and recedes from the other. Spider tries desperately to control the landscape around him, writing tiny gibberish in a notebook and stringing his bare room with webs made out of twine, but this only serves to spook the bejesus out of his landlady, Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave). Ominously, he reads her fear as a threat.

Most of the time, however, Spider is locked in recollections of his childhood, which are almost comic in their generic grimy-Britishness except for the scenes where his grunting animal of a father (Gabriel Byrne) murders his delicate mother (Miranda Richardson) and replaces her with a cackling tart from the pub (also played by Richardson). This, more than the rooming house, is where Spider lives -- in the faulty shards of memory. It's up to us to refit the pieces together.

The picture they make when they finally click into place is a shade too obvious, and you're forgiven if you come out of "Spider" feeling that you've seen only an artsy-fartsy "Twilight Zone" episode. It's the getting there that matters, though. Fiennes gives an performance of unnerving, internalized rigor, as far from the movie-star posturings of "Maid in Manhattan" as can be imagined. Perhaps this is a Serious Actor's form of atonement, but the actor seems as jackrabbit-scared of the camera as Spider is of reality, and the result is a far more jagged and distressing portrait of schizophrenia than the rosy psychoses of "A Beautiful Mind". For Spider, the box remains shut.

What's your favorite Ralph Fiennes performance? Feel free to leave a comment or add to someone else's.

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