Willard Spider
Cooper, Rand Richards
SCREEN 'Willard' & 'Spider' Rand Richards Cooper CREEPY THINGS attered by round-the-clock coverage of war, I decided to seek refuge in scary movies and let fantasy images of dread replace the...
...and a rotten-toothed floozy from the corner bar (also Miranda Richardson) who becomes his father's lover...
...The movie's opening frames show a Rorschach-like series of blots and blotches-the torn plaster on the walls, perhaps-ambiguously morphing into ominous shapes that might be spiders, suggesting how a damaged mind distorts reality into monsters of menace...
...This is a far more external treatment than Roman Polanski provides in such classic films of madness as Repulsion or The Tenant...
...Whether the gleaming instruments of surgical torture wielded by Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers or the car-crash sex of Crash, his movies push violence to the edge of the pornographic...
...and when we first hear Willard's mother's voice hectoring him from within her room, for a moment it seems she might be a figment of a Norman Bates-like imagination...
...Muttering incoherently, attentive to demons only he can hear and see, Fiennes depicts the adult Spider as hopelessly lost in psychosis, a picture of shambling, tormented abjection...
...But no...
...A gasworks looms over the neighborhood, and Dennis Clegg (Ralph Fiennes) can't pass it without shuddering in terror...
...At work, he labors as a lowly clerk in a company weaseled away from his late father by the current owner, Mr...
...Ben, meanwhile, the evil rat, checks in at roughly the size and weight of an armadillo, and bores through wood so efficiently he should be sold at the Home Depot...
...his loving mother (Miranda Richardson...
...Whether frantical-* ly wrapping newspapers around his midsection and tying them with string, or filling a notebook with jumbled hieroglyphs in a nonsense language, Fiennes's character remains closed to us, a collection of terrified private compulsions...
...Both these films trace psychotic male violence to a dark realm of boyhood where humiliation, Oedipal anxiety, and suppressed rage bleed together...
...Like the filthy boarding house, where plaster falls from the walls in ragged pathces, and Fiennes lies half submerged in a tub of rusty brown bath water, body fish-belly white, arms wrapped around himself, eyes peering sideways in terror...
...Cronenberg's adaptation incorporates a time-traveling visual conceit, by which Fiennes's character (whose childhood nickname was Spider) haunts not only his old neighborhood but his own childhood...
...as if the house itself is not merely alive, but loudly digesting something...
...Director Glen Morgan revered Willard as a boy, and his remake tosses off tongue-in-cheek tributes at every turn, like the portrait of actor Bruce Davison, the original Willard, hanging in the Stiles' house...
...Martin berates the cowering boy-man...
...But where Sling Blade asked us to sympathize with its deeply disturbed protagonist, Cronenberg keeps us at a distance...
...As a filmmaker, Cronenberg has a notorious fascination for lurid sexual violence...
...This dreamlike doubling leaves us uncertain what is real and what belongs to Spider's psychotic delusions...
...or the sequence in which a cat gets a gruesome comeuppance, set to Michael Jackson's syrupy ballad, "Ben," written for the 1972 sequel...
...Willard stoked and solaced the adolescent male dread of perpetual weakness, fashioning a memorably nasty weapon for wreaking the ultimate revenge of the nerd...
...The inanimate world brought to life-terrifyingly, by madness-also figures prominently in horrormeister David Cronenberg's Spider, a grim account of a man released after decades in an insane asylum to a halfway house situated, with cruel coincidence, in the same dreary East London neighborhood that witnessed his childhood undoing...
...It risks substituting wretchedness for madness as the film's subject, and pity for dread as our response...
...SCREEN 'Willard' & 'Spider' Rand Richards Cooper CREEPY THINGS attered by round-the-clock coverage of war, I decided to seek refuge in scary movies and let fantasy images of dread replace the all-too-real ones on my TV...
...Un-typically, Cronenberg uses no special effects...
...Cronenberg has been winning critical accolades for his masterly control, but to me his detachment seems like a mistake...
...Lee Ermey, in the role originally played by the peerless Ernest Borgnine...
...It's an odd mismatch: Cronenberg sets out to evoke the fevered agonies of schizophrenia, but detachment, rather than subjectivity, governs his film's style...
...He provides no temptation to "identify," and in this sense his film remains fixedly, even belligerently, unsentimental...
...The over-the-top Gothic of its look and performances gets in the way, and so does the obviousness of its jokes-as when Boss Martin, soon to be mortally nibbled, sits clicking happily away at his office computer in the dead of night, and the camera lands not once, not twice, but four times on...
...The movie played shrewdly to a boy's self-pitying imagination, posing images of military fealty and gruesome revenge, while offering Symbolism 101 in the face-off between a benign white mouse named Socrates and the nasty black rat, Ben...
...This is an austere, uncompromising film, whose silences and grim, despairing absurdity evoke Samuel Beckett...
...Spider is based on a book by Patrick McGrath, a British writer whose father ran a hospital for the criminally insane, and whose childhood fascination for the place and its inmates informed his novel's diary of a madman...
...In the lead role, Crispin Glover, a virtuoso of hapless-ness (the dad in Back to the Future, the reporter in Nurse Betty), plays Willard as a pale homunculus, twitching and quivering in misery...
...In scene after scene we see him lurking in the background, spying on his own formative (or rather, deformative) boyhood encounters with his alcoholic plumber father (Gabriel Byrne...
...Given what Willard is teaching his rats in the basement, this is one metaphor the boss will live (though not for long...
...Martin (R...
...At home he endures the derision of his mother, who taunts him- why doesn't he grow up and start acting like a man?-even as she monitors his bathroom activities...
...The collaboration results in a few moments of nightmarish visual perfection, such as the image of a freight elevator opening and thousands of rats pouring out into the corridor-a gushing silken stream that leaves Willard standing there, prince of the rodents...
...The director and his cameraman, Peter Suschitsky, confront us with one desolate image after another...
...While Spider covers similar psychosexual territory, its surface shows remarkable restraint...
...An obvious place to turn was the new remake of Willard...
...With its rusty front gate, the decrepit Stiles house resembles the Bates mansion in Psycho...
...Business is a rat race, Willard...
...Willard's life is one endless humilation...
...Spider isn't entirely successful, but it does effectively remind us that what's really creepy aren't the literal creatures in our basements, but the metaphorical ones crawling in the dark closets of our minds...
...Spider invites comparison with Sling Blade, Billy Bob Thornton's Oscar-winning story of a mentally ill man released years after committing horrible family violence...
...Spider keeps us well outside both its protagonist's childhood fears and his adult miseries...
...The original Willard was low-rent Hitchcock, a pastiche of Psycho and The Birds that matched Freudian hijinks to the satisfying vision of rodent hordes gnawing their way through your worst enemies...
...there's almost no blood on screen, and just one moment of physical brutality...
...Where Willard meets the theme of a cowering boy's vengeance with crowd-pleasing scenes of chaos and gore, Cronenberg's film summons a bleak minimalism that seems liable to empty the typical multiplex...
...For men in their forties, there's probably no more popular cinematic touchstone of tortured adolescence than Daniel Mann's 1971 tale of a timid young man and his battalion of killer rates...
...And in the culminating scene, where the horde turns at last against Willard, the Stiles's house is seen from outside, and we hear a strange, monstrous growl or gurgle...
...And yet the film itself is far less fluid...
...But the movie is too busy winking to be authentically scary...
...Get it...
...And yet they couldn't be more dissimilar...
...rumbling mysteriously, much like the Stiles house in Willard, it's one of several objects and places of fixation whose significance comes clear only gradually, as a violent past is laid bare...
...the inner logic of his actions remains for much of the movie obscure, with Cronenberg, for suspense's sake, withholding their origins until the very end...
...to regret...
...Willard was made with five hundred trained rodents, plus many more of the animatronic variety...
...the computer mouse...
...Part way through the film, the floozy also seems to take the place of the nurse attendant who runs the adult Spider's halfway house...
...Stiles (Jackie Burroughs) is all too real, if not all that realistic-a haggard crone with blackened toenails and frazzled witch's hair...
Vol. 130 • April 2003 • No. 7
