Cheap Spider (DVD) (Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne) (David Cronenberg) Price

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Customer Reviews of Spider

Spider pulls you into it's web.
Spider is a fantastic film. Although slow moving, it's showcases some superb acting and Cronenburg's grittiness, while keeping you filled with anticipation and curiosity. Ralph Fiennes, in his best performance to date plays Spider a mumbling schizophrenic who can be seen picking up random bits of trash or putting his hands down his pants to pull out a sock where he keeps his note. Spider recalls his past, particularly the relationship between his mother (played brilliantly by Miranda Richardson - who plays multiple roles in the film) and his father (played by Gabriel Byrne) while he was a small boy. Young spider is played by Bradley Hall a boy who's trying to deal with the confusing world around him. It's a remarkable performance for this young actor's film debut. The film's quite thought-provoking and ends up playing out like a mystery, to see how a young boy became the Spider he is today.

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Interesting experiment in narrative point of view
Recently released from a mental institution, Dennis 'Spider' Cleg is assigned to a halfway house beside an ominous-looking gasworks in London's East End. He spends the first twenty minutes of the film muttering incomprehensibly and scribbling in no known language in his notebook. Why was he committed? Why has he been released? What will he do now? We soon discover we aren't going to be told these things - we're going to be shown. As Spider revisits the sites of his early childhood, memories of the past and experiences of the present dramatically merge, and it becomes clear that he's once again losing his mind. "Spider" is interesting mainly for its artful attempts, in both production and performance, to externalize the experience of schizophrenia. Ralph Fiennes gives a daring performance in the lead role, and Miranda Richardson is wonderful playing two very different characters who are conflated in the young Spider's mind. Cronenberg's London is appropriately frightening - deserted, mysterious and sinister - and Peter Suschitzky's thoughtful camerawork makes a convincing tilt at representing a mind on the brink of insanity. As other reviewers have noted, Cronenberg's strategy here is to present a shifting "reality" that's deliberately unreliable, until the veracity of everything is called into question. It's an interesting cinematic experiment. Ultimately, though, it's this very unreliability that undermines "Spider" as a piece of storytelling. When none of the evidence can be trusted, most of the pleasures associated with watching a mystery story unfold - anticipation, suspicion, suspense and surprise - simply fade away. It gets dull. Very dull. And there's little in the way of action or drama to lift the pace. Overall, "Spider" is a technically compelling but not quite engaging film. If you're interested in filmmaking, adaptation, unreliable narrative, or the way in which all aspects of a film's realization can be interestingly deployed in pursuit of a single theme, then you'll probably find "Spider" an absorbing night's viewing and a film you'll want to own. But if you're looking for what's usually meant by "a brilliant and powerful psychological thriller", this isn't one. Which is no surprise, really: since when was the lived experience of schizophrenia "entertaining"?

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Haunting
After sitting on my self for well over a couple of months I decided to give this movie a try. My expectations weren't very high and I expected something on par with Willard.
From the very beginning I was captivated with Ralph Fiennes' performance and he really communicated the feelings of being totally drawn in on himself.
The unfolding of the story was depicted in such a way that we experience the confusion and emotional turmoil of the main character.
While I've never been a big fan of Freud, the movie does make use of Freud's Oedipal Complex theory and models Spider's entire relationship with his parents is based on it. Spider's idealization of his mother made him incapable of seeing her negative qualities. While his mother did make efforts to be a "good mum" she also shared her husbands wrecklessness and drinking problem. In order to displace his mothers undeniable neglect he displaces her, in his mind, with a bar fly who flashes her breast at him at the local pub.
In reality Spider's father isn't too far removed from his mother. A man who makes efforts to be a good father but doesn't do much to eliminate his vices, however, Spider staying true to Oedipal victimhood takes a hostile view of his father and ignores the good qualities and demonizes his father.
While it is clear that Spider's memories are often twisted and others are mere imagination that he uses to make sense of what's going on around him, we can still say with relative certainty that his parents were too selfish in their drinking and partying to have any idea what their actions were having on their son.
The truly sad part of the movie is that Spider is never willing to look the truth straight in the face and the only time he admits to himself that the drunken woman really was his mother is when he kills her. So he selectively chooses to see the truth only when he is at fault. This partial look at the reality of his life is what keeps him locked in his past.

A truly sad movie and one I will not soon forget.