To kiss a spider

Christian Century, May 22, 2002 by Steve Vineberg

SAM RAIMI has produced an affably modest and intimate Spider-Man. It doesn't define itself by computer-generated effects; it's scaled to the size of its hero, the genial teenage science nerd Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), and its heroine, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), the auburn-haired girl next door whom Parker has adored since they were six.

"This story is about a girl," Parker explains at the outset, and Dunst's radiant, expressive face is the film's emblem. When Parker is bitten by a genetically enhanced spider that has escaped from a museum display, and develops arachnoid agility and strength as well as the ability to spin webs, his first, instinctive act is to save M. J. from an embarrassing fall in the school cafeteria. And when he takes on the identity of Spider-Man, crime-stopper and protector of the innocent, his rescue scenes always culminate in his deftly removing M. J. from peril.

Peter's metamorphosis is another fantasy metaphor for the mysteries of being an adolescent. (In the movies, Brian De Palma first investigated this notion with the telekinetic teen protagonists of Carrie and The Fury; the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer is predicated on an analogy between the supernatural and the emotional turbulence of growing up.) Peter wakes up after his spider attack delighted to find that he's sprouted a magnificent ripple of muscles. The gluey webs seem to spill out of him at their own will, until he figures out how to control them. The sexual joke is explicit (and very funny), though Maguire dispatches it with cunning understatement.

The greatest mystery, of course, is first love. Peter is nuts over M. J., but he courts her only in his Spider-Man disguise because he still thinks of Peter Parker as an also-ran. He doesn't pick up on the way she looks at him when she's supposed to be dating his best friend, the rich kid Harry Osborn (James Franco). When they finally share a kiss in the rain, after Spider-Man has rescued her for the second time, he's hanging upside down from a building and she has to peel back his mask to reach his lips. It's the most romantic movie encounter since Liv Tyler abjured immortality for love of Viggo Mortensen in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

The best invention in David Koepp's screenplay is the equation of love with superheroism, which is spelled out in Peter's speech in praise of M.J.--which he claims to have offered to Spider-Man on behalf of the smitten M. J.--in which he ends up articulating exactly how she makes him feel. The problem with the script is that it doesn't entirely make good on this idea or develop other ones that are hinted at. Parker dons his Spider-Man costume for the first time to challenge a flashy wrestler for prize money so he can buy a car (to impress M. J.); he wins the prize, but he's scammed out of most of it by the slimy promoter, so he refuses to raise a finger to help when the man is robbed. His bitterness in this scene suggests a darker side of Parker, but that's the last we see of it; once he stands up against the supervillainous Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), his heart has become so pure that the Goblin's efforts to tempt him to the dark side have no resonance.

The tension between Peter and Harry over M. J. would have a deeper ring if Koepp had dramatized the jealousy Harry would naturally feel over the fact that his tycoon dad--who is, unbeknownst to either of the young men, the human being inside the Green Goblin--prefers the brilliant Peter to his own son. Franco is certainly a good enough actor to carry off this idea. Though his role is truncated, he brings a creepy ambivalence to it, a gentle-betrayer quality that's aided by his uncanny physical and stylistic resemblance to James Dean.

Raimi's refusal to make Spider-Man a comic-book epic is admirable, but it's also a limitation: the movie is for the most part undistinguished visually. And except for the early transformation sequences, the scenes that aren't focused on the romance are not freshly written or convincingly directed. But when Maguire and Dunst share the screen the movie finds its subject and its heart.

Steve Vineberg teaches theater and film at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.