Our first duty, with regard to “Spider-Man 2,” is to congratulate the filmmakers on their refusal to elasticate the title. I am fed up with having to wrap my tongue around “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” and, as for the forthcoming “Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid,” why bother to see a picture whose name goes on even longer than its leading snake? There would have been little percentage in luring us with “Spider-Man 2: Back Up Through the Plughole,” or “Spider-Man 2: Still Not Quite Sure What to Do with All His Sticky Stuff.” We know the deal.
This second film—written by Alvin Sargent and directed, once again, by Sam Raimi—is, like the first installment, refreshingly perverse in its intent. It is an action movie founded on indecision. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) continues to be blessed with an armory of web-based gifts, which enable him to wreak a twanging revenge on the criminal element of New York, and to widen the eyes of Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) in the process, yet part of Peter craves the quiet life. In the first half of the movie, he merrily swings by during a police pursuit, strings up the villains, and stops a car from landing on the heads of crushable citizens; in the second half, he spies an alleyway mugging, pauses, then walks away. There is only one young man I can think of who was more torn about his purpose in life, and he, regrettably, was taken off the case by Laertes.
One reason that superhero franchises are now so rampant in Hollywood is that, more often than not, they lend thrust to the revenge of the nerd. All the reported haggling over who would play Spider-Man—Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, you name it—was basically a means of fending off the awful truth that the person most suited to the role was never going to be available, because he was too busy running Microsoft. The moment at which Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne, a twitching social misfit, decided to shoehorn himself into black rubber for “Batman,” back in 1989, we realized that the world would no longer be saved by tough guys but by dreamy, fetishistic types who donned their mock toughness as a form of extreme therapy. That is why George Clooney’s Batman came off worst of all; Clooney is the one current American star who hails from the constellation of true leading men, and so, when he does appear, we like him straight up, not hiding his light beneath a hood. Maguire’s Spider-Man, on the other hand, spends most of the time wringing his adhesive hands over the doubleness of his nature, and Raimi takes care to insert innumerable gags at the expense of Parker’s geekhood—taking a tumble in the street, or grabbing for and missing the canapés at a swish soirée where Mary Jane, understandably miffed at his vacillations, gets engaged to another man. And not just any man, but an astronaut.
Every movie franchise demands a regular turnover of nemeses, and “Spider-Man 2” does not disappoint. In fact, it performs better than its predecessor, for, in place of the wildly cackling and therefore deeply unfrightening Green Goblin, we have Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina), known to the tabloids as Doc Ock. Molina is such a singular presence: fleshy, pendulous, and sad, like a secret love child of Charles Laughton. Otto, a pensive scientist with a poetry-reading wife, seems only mildly put out when one of his experiments backfires, leaving him with four metal limbs that appear to have plans, and perhaps even voting intentions, very different from his own. They writhe and snap like Medusa’s hair, they enable Otto to scale buildings, and they light his cigar; what services they provide in the privacy of his bathroom I shudder to think. They even walk the walk for him, clattering along like the claws of a crab, and Molina seems to relish the ride with an unflustered serenity. Amid all this, we get a dull subplot about Harry Osborn (James Franco), the scion of the Green Goblin, who keeps tearfully vowing to avenge his father’s death, but we know what we want here: we want Spider-Man to join battle with Doc Ock, and, in so doing, to wreck as much real estate as possible.
Hence the climactic feud, which takes place on an elevated train of the movie’s own devising; the real New York has been overlaid with a comic-book brightness, although Raimi insures that the subway carful of New Yorkers who offer help to Spider-Man are reassuringly ordinary in their heroism, and in their own deep need for reassurance. So vigorous is the fight that Spider-Man is unmasked, and the passengers find themselves looking at the non-super face of Peter Parker: “He’s just a kid,” one of them says. By the end of the film, Mary Jane, too, sees our hero hoodless, but she registers little surprise. “I think I always knew,” she says, and, if there’s one actress to whom producers turn for lack of faze, it’s Kirsten Dunst. She looks no happier about the hue of her hair, which could be the pelt of a highly embarrassed fox, than she did in the previous picture, but there is wonderful consolation in the near-narcoleptic calm of her gaze. The typical Dunst reverie, in which the body is all there but the mind is elsewhere, makes her the least modern of actresses; look at stills of Marion Davies, or other stalwarts of the silent era, and you catch the same strain of inward rhapsody. (Mary Jane is even tied up and imperilled toward the end, like an early heroine lashed to a railroad track.) Thus, perhaps, the unexpected—even unplanned—strangeness of Raimi’s film, which fulfills its brief as a summer smash but which also proceeds with a distracted and sometimes lonely air. Never has a blockbuster, I would guess, required so many soliloquies. What with the mournful Molina, the hazed-over Dunst, and the puffy uncertainties of Maguire, we in the audience are the only ones who still believe, without qualification, in thrill and spill. Consider the moment at which Peter’s lips draw close to Mary Jane’s, opening slightly for a kiss, only to be interrupted by a large automobile being tossed through the window behind them. Don’t you just love it when that happens?
The closeups at the start of “The Clearing” are too close for comfort. Arnold Mack (Willem Dafoe) is getting up and preparing for work, but the way the camera treats him, inspecting everything from the lather on his chin to the part in his hair, suggests somebody who is destined for a physical, or a police lineup. As things turn out, this hint of unhealthiness, whether of body or of soul, is well founded, for Arnold is about to embark on a day’s intensive kidnapping. Later, we realize that he has even made a couple of packed lunches, with a choice of ham or tuna for his victim.
The victim is Wayne Hayes (Robert Redford), and I hope I’m not alone in feeling a twinge of cosmic sadness at the thought that Robert Redford, who once flashed the most winning smile in the world, has been reduced to playing somebody named Wayne Hayes. Still, if Wayne represents the clouding over of the Sundance Kid, he doesn’t show it; he lives in a sylvan suburb, with a pool, a dog, a maid, and a car so fancy that its side mirrors open and close like the petals of a remote-controlled rose. It’s a fitting gimmick, since Wayne made his pile in the car-rental business—he’s “the man Hertz and Avis are afraid of,” in the words of the awestruck Arnold. The problem with Arnold is that nobody is afraid of him. He was laid off long ago in the wake of Wayne’s success, but now, in his mild and sweaty fashion, he is bent on vengeance. With his fussy planning and his fake mustache, Arnold is a throwback to the old-fashioned desperation of the little man: an Arthur Miller character doing a David Mamet thing.
The film soon settles into a two-tone plot, dividing its time between a tranquil forest, through which Arnold guides Wayne with a gun, and the Hayes family home. There Eileen Hayes (Helen Mirren) holds court, awaiting her husband’s return, and condescending exquisitely to the F.B.I. officials who are handling the crime. One of them, Agent Fuller (Matt Craven), moves in, and she comes to know his personal habits: “Pepsi for breakfast?” she inquires, with an intonation rarely heard since Marie Antoinette took an interest in the bakery products of the peasantry. When she is questioned about one of Wayne’s former secretaries, she replies, “My husband had an affair with her,” implying that she ordered it to cease. When she is informed that the affair had continued without her knowledge, she receives the news as if learning of a crack in a teacup. This is Mirren’s film, all the way, not simply because she remains cool and commanding, although it is perfectly true that you could store a case of Chablis in her heart, but because she has the wit to push that coolness to suspicious extremes. Eileen professes love for her vanished husband, and a sappy, retrospective epilogue backs her up, yet if Arnold weren’t such a loser I would seriously wonder whether she herself had set the kidnapping in motion.
Mirren does all this, I guess, because, more clearly than the men around her, she sees the movie’s yawning fault—the nagging threat of dullness—and tries to make amends. She was equally rigorous and stiff-spined in the television series “Prime Suspect,” but there we had an array of tasty mysteries to be savored and solved, whereas “The Clearing,” written by Justin Haythe and directed by Pieter Jan Brugge, is a thriller stripped of thrills—or, even worse, a thriller that thinks of itself as somehow rising above the vulgar pleasures of excitement. Brugge is directing his first film here, and there’s no mistaking his ambition; as a producer or an executive producer, he worked on “The Insider,” “Bulworth,” and “Heat,” each of which was startlingly keen to stretch a genre. Yet all of them, however thought-provoking, took the trouble to arouse, whereas “The Clearing” wants the thought without the provocation. The climax of the tale appears to have so embarrassed the filmmakers that we see it only in flashback, as a wincing afterthought, and even then we can’t quite tell what occurred. I hate to say it, but if Arnold ever made a movie it would look like this. ♦
