Wired Mesh

The Blessed Visions of St. Peter Parker

My Spider-Man 2 rave from this week's Pulse -- including those missing words covered up in print editions by Kirsten Dunst's elbow. I wrote this piece Monday afternoon with the Shins' sweet, miserable "New Slang" on repeat in my headphones, which may account for my extreme emphasis on Spidey's sorrows. (See, this is the kind of insider information about the Aaron Mesh writing process that you can only get from this online source! Hoo boy! Donate now!)

Spider-Man 2 is one of the finest spiritual films of the new century. And it’s the best movie of the year

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the July 7 issue of the Pulse

“The shaping of a golem,” Michael Chabon writes in his lovely, lyrical novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, “was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something – one poor, dumb, powerful thing – exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation.” But one of the many splendid joys of Spider-Man 2 is the insight (no doubt emerging in great part from Chabon’s contributions to the film’s script) that a superhero, as much as any river-creature summoned by Kabbalic intonation, must come to terms with its own feet of clay. “Hit me and I bleed,” Peter Parker earnestly informs his longtime paramour Mary Jane, and indeed he does, stretching his arms to the breaking point to stop a runaway e-train, suffering a vicious scar across his side, and collapsing into the arms of the passengers he’s saved in a pieta worthy of Michelangelo.

The messianic overtones are palpable, but what makes Spider-Man 2 one of the finest spiritual films of this young century, and the best movie of the year so far, is the flawlessly structured, devastatingly internal struggle of its hero, as he decides whether he’ll take this savior business seriously. Peter can’t escape the tension of his task: he’d rather be smooching Mary Jane than shooting webs at madmen, and by the film’s midway mark, he’s dumped his bright red tights in a back-alley trash can and is off to pursue a normal human life. This is The Last Temptation of Peter Parker, a desperate effort to reconcile an identity torn between the human and the nearly divine.

I’m afraid all of this makes Spider-Man 2 sound less like a comic-book movie than some wintry Ingmar Bergman angst-fest, but Sam Raimi has crafted a film that works on a bundle of levels, any one of which is far more entertaining than anything else at the multiplex. What’s amazing is how he’s managed to blend these layers – religious allegory, personal anxiety and kinetic action – into something compelling and wholehearted. The movie picks up two years after the first Spider-Man’s events, and Tobey Maguire’s Peter is still swinging about New York’s skyline while hiding his alter ego from those he loves. The film’s look is the same as well, still abuzz with brilliant, caricatured colors, but this time around Raimi summons a well of equally fiery emotions that the first movie only hinted at. Maguire whoops and hollers his way through skyscrapers, but he always seems on the verge of crying, pained by ugly memories of failure and the impossibility of fixing the past. And now he faces a villain with sorrow that eclipses his own: Alfred Molina’s Dr. Otto Octavius, who loses his wife and his dreams in a science experiment, then spends each minute losing his mind to the control of four robotic arms that have become fused to his body.

That the battles of these two broken men are exhilarating is, I suppose, to be expected; what’s startling is how Raimi counters the thrills with a steady flow of humor and pathos. The movie’s best sequence seamlessly merges this trio of elements: first Peter falls out the clouds, his web-shooting ability suddenly blocked by his fretfulness. Terrified by the prospect of leaping from another building, he does what anyone might: he takes the elevator down, still in his Spidey-suit, and the resultant encounter with a bewildered metrosexual stretches into side-splitting awkwardness. Before the laughter fades, Raimi cuts to a shot of the grounded hero limping home, slumping past a wall swathed with perfume posters featuring the face of Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane.

There are so many other scenes to praise in Spider-Man 2 – a horrifying surgery-gone-awry cribbed from the Evil Dead movies; a conversation between Peter and Mary Jane that’s a hilariously textbook study in miscommunication – and so many fine performances that it’s hard to single any element out. (Rosemay Harris and J. K. Simmons are again fine, and James Franco steals his scenes as Harry Osborne, the sort of ruffian that would have been described in another time as a young wastrel.) But amongst all these wonders is a perfectly integrated movie about the very idea of completeness – a simple, delightful thought about the reconciliation of Peter Parker’s dual nature. Here, masked in the disguise of a fantastical action flick, is a movie dedicated to its belief in the possibility of human integrity, a film that dares us to hope that we might someday reunite the people we long to be with the flawed creatures we actually are. Spider-Man 2 is a gesture of hope, a powerful thing that soars far above the habitual disappointments of other movies and our own lives. It beckons us to fly as well.

Posted by mesh at July 7, 2004 05:51 PM | TrackBack