The Film excerpted from our retrospective interview with David Cronenberg found here

The tightest film of Cronenberg's career, and easily his most restrained, Spider unfolds like the predator of its title in its careful exploration of the effects of schizophrenia on the natural process of Freud's model for the Oedipal Split. Feeling accomplished but unsurprising after an initial viewing, subsequent looks reveal a film meticulous in its composition and beautifully crafted in every aspect of the craft, from Suschitzky's gorgeous camera work to Shore's fragile piano-heavy score. Ralph Fiennes' Dennis Cleg spins a web of remembrance and fantasy in a scrawling cuneiform, journaling his perceptions in a tattered log as he himself is thrown into relief against a parchment wallpaper--the gibberish evolving on the page cast against the gibberish of the devolving man. Fiennes and Miranda Richardson (and Lynn Redgrave and John Neville) provide performances to match the subtle technical virtuosity of Spider as Cronenberg and screenwriter Patrick McGrath (working from a novel by McGrath) abandon all pretensions and tackle the primacy of sexual desire from an alien's outsider perspective: a quest in which the auteur has arguably been involved since the beginning of his career. With an actor (Richardson) playing multiple roles, a quintessentially Freudian love story, and the belief in the technology-aided (the looming Gas Works in Spider) evolution of the flesh (Dennis believes that his body emits deadly fumes)--the climax in which Fiennes looms over his house-mistress with hammer and chisel, intent on finding the monster in his mother's flesh, resolves itself as a succinct, literal statement about discovering the truth of sexuality buried beneath the façade of civilization. Dreamlike and deceptively complex, Spider is a culmination and a commencement--a statement--the director's strongest--that Cronenberg is not only a genre director of remarkable vision, but a filmmaker of note unbound by genre and invested, over the course of the last thirty-some years, in the pernicious id and the possible offspring of a literal embrace with the shadow of our id.-Walter Chaw FOR MORE SPIDER DISCUSSION, SEE OUR FIRST INTERVIEW WITH MR . CRONENBERG AS WELL AS TRAVIS HOOVER'S REVIEW

The DVD
Sling Blade by way of Dennis Potter courtesy of Canada's greatest living director, Spider arrives on DVD in the United States from Columbia Tri-Star. Curiously absent of the "Special Edition" banner, the release is one of the studio's better of late for supplementary material, starting with another of David Cronenberg's sui generis commentaries, wherein he could be said to focus on the film's three key collaborations--those between himself and star Ralph Fiennes, screenwriter Patrick McGrath, and composer Howard Shore. (Contrary to assumptions, Shore did not author the fragile melody that opens the film, an Elizabethan ode to maternity.) Cronenberg's dissection of Spider's variations on the novel on which it's based is a vital lesson in adaptation, and his inclination to use biological adjectives (he describes the picture as being paced according to "Spider's metabolism," for instance) communicates objectives far more clearly than filmmaking jargon ever could. Married to a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that should've been derived from a cleaner source print (and given a boost in shadow detail, although the overall grubby texture of the film comes across just fine), it's an irreproachable yak-track; the other listening option, Spider's own Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, is lovely but subdued and anchored at the fore of the soundstage. Worth noting is the fact that the English subtitles translate much of Spider's unintelligible dialogue, though his words prove as superfluous as one might expect.

Three featurettes consist mainly of interviews with Cronenberg in which he addresses aspects of the production many behind-the-scenes documentaries take for granted, such as financing and viewer reaction. "In the Beginning: How Spider Came to Be" (8 mins.) recounts Cronenberg's early suspicion of the project--even though (or, perhaps, because) it had the endorsement of a major talent agency (CAA)--through to the first three weeks of shooting, during which the entire crew went without pay. "Weaving the Web: The Making of Spider" (9 mins.) begins at the beginning, with Cronenberg demonstrating the comparative lack of expressionism in Spider's train-station entrance to the rest of the picture, whose sets are almost unpopulated. The director also encourages us to doubt the film's formal revelations, suggesting that manifold interpretations await Spider's childhood traumas. And in "Caught in Spider's Web: The Cast" (12 mins.), it's Gabriel Byrne who makes the choicest statement: "[Spider's father] is the most difficult character I've ever played." For what it's worth, Fiennes, hunched-over and reserved in these mini-docs, seems not to have fully shaken off the character. Cast & crew filmographies and trailers for Spider (its overreliance on critical quotes only underscores what an unenviable task it would be to condense Spider down to two salable minutes), Adaptation., Punch-Drunk Love, and The Devil's Backbone round out the platter.-Bill Chambers

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