journal features

movie review - Spider

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2003.10.28

This is an odd film that makes me wonder if there's not a better book out there that tells the same tale. It's about a wreck of a man (played, in usual fashion, by Ralph Fiennes) who arrives at a half-way house plagued by the memories of his childhood.

Unfortunately, the retelling of that childhood is a bit uneven. While you're presented with a reasonably straight-forward storyline, in the end you're not sure how much of what you've seen is remembered, how much is simply derived from the man's madness, and which is which.

The thing is shot with an intriguing style - sedated and slightly abstracted. Everyone seems to move through the film as if suffering from tinnitus or a migraine; isolated and distracted. It's worth a viewing, but the confusion it causes robs the thing of some of its effect.

Recommended. With my cautions as noted.

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner