Spider-Man Gets Sensitive

The movie audience has been on a post-Lenten fast lately. Last weekend’s total take at the domestic box office was only $77.7 million — a most unlucky number for the studios dumping their clearance-sale titles on an apathetic market. For filmgoers, this was the purge before the binge. A heady month is ahead, with Shrek the Third and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End ready to pick the public’s pockets. And this weekend: Spider-Man 3, which on its own is guaranteed to top last weekend’s cume. Anything under a $100 million launch would be disappointing for a threequel with a budget in at least the quarter-billion-dollar range. These days directors of special-effects epics can spend money faster than Tony Soprano at the roulette table.

Tony, in moments of crisis, has an anxiety attack or orders someone’s death. In Spider-Man 3, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), the young-adult nerd with preternatural powers, gets covered in intergalactic black stickum. Once he’s gooed, he’s bad — bad for him, anyway, which is still better than most of us on our best behavior. He spends much of the movie trying to resist the temptation of outlawry, the nefarious fashion of basic black.

This plot device has tested the credulity of some early viewers of Spider-Man 3, as I gleaned from snippets of Jon Stewart’s chat with Maguire on Tuesday’s Daily Show. “Here’s what I buy,” Stewart said teasingly. “A supergenetic spider bites you on the hand and you yourself take on some of the characteristics of a spider. [But now] apparently something falls from outer space and it turns into a black suit. And that for me is where the Spider-Man series, y’ know, loses its believability.”

Plausibility isn’t the biggest challenge for the comic-book-movie fan base. Sentimentality is. An Ain’t It Cool News review, supposedly written by the mother of a friend of AICN critic Moriarty, tosses Spidey 3 into the sar-chasm by informing us that “There’s only about 25 minutes of actual Spidey footage in this movie — which makes all kinds of room for: That darling Mary Jane singing (two songs!). Peter Parker crying. Harry [Osborn] crying…. The Sandman crying. Eddie Brock crying. Mary Jane crying. Aunt May crying…. And yes, I might as well tell you, there ARE a few action scenes that get in the way of all the interesting stuff between the characters and their relationships and their ordinary, everyday lives.”

No question, this is one wet action movie. It sets a world’s record for so-called tough guys shedding tears. Harry Osborn (James Franco) gets weepie over his father’s death, and enraged at his belief that Peter was responsible for it; he vents his rage in the supervillain guise of the New Goblin. Before being transformed into the irradiated Sandman, Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), the recidivist hoodlum — and murderer of Peter’s sainted uncle — goes all soft and moist as he clutches his young daughter’s locket. Peter has a jewelry fetish too: his aunt has given him her wedding ring, which he plans to present to his girlfriend Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst). But our hero has more urgent concerns. His protracted adolescent funk has given way to an anxiety crisis, from which his ability to soar over the city saving lives cannot extricate him.

Spidey 3 is essentially a romantic drama punctuated by SPFX chases. It’s about bonding, breaking the bonds and retying them, tighter than ever. The major characters all are in need of sensitivity training, and they all get it, often just before they die. They beg for forgiveness, understanding, and love. The emotions are so exalted, the movie is like opera without the arias. And virtually all of these sob-sisters are guys. It’s got more noble man-love than any movie since … well, since 300, except that these action figures don’t have the Spartans’ gigantic, tumorous abs. I can hear the fanboys shouting, “There’s no crying in action movies!” I can’t imagine them hugging this movie to their man-bosoms.

Which could be why I liked it. To place a sensitive story in a male-epic genre — to dramatize feelings of angst and personal betrayal worthy of an Ingmar Bergman film, and then to dress them up in gaudy comic-book colors — is to pull off a smartly subversive drag show. With, yes, 25 mins. of fabulous fights. Peter’s tussle with Sandman, and his aerial battle with the supersonic skateboarding New Goblin, are plenty snazzy. But anyone can do that; in action movies, everyone has done that. What’s better, in a threequel, is rethinking the characters, the franchise and the genre.

SPI-DENTITY CRISIS

It’s not a bad idea for superhero trilogies to follow the formula set down in the Superman films of the late 70s and early 80s. First movie: the hero discovers his secret powers. Second movie: he shares he secret with his girlfriend. The third movie is about how it’s not so super being a hero. Success, that cruel muse, threatens to transform him into a corrupt cartoon of his earlier, purer self. Recall that, in Superman III, a blend of kryptonite and tobacco tar split the Man of Steel in half, into good Supe and bad Supe. Christ battles antichrist, and they’re the same person.

In Spidey 3, Peter is starting to fall in love with his reputation. It’s not enough that he save people; he must be seen saving them. “They love me!” he cries with a dawning pleasure. Celebrity is this superhero’s cocaine. The headlines are the high — that, and the attentions of ultra-blond trophy girl Gwen (Bryce Dallas Howard). The “something from outer space” Stewart referred to is really just an expression of the inner conflict between the old and new Peter. “Who are you?” Mary Jane demands, and Peter honestly replies, “I don’t know.”

What he does know is that he feels a rush in the black suit he never got in the red one. Problem is, Peter is still enough of a nice kid that he can’t quite pull off the attendant arrogance. When he combs his hair forward, he’s still a dweeb, not a dude. When he tells a villain, “I guess you haven’t heard I’m the sheriff round these parts,” he’s still geeky-gawky, closer to John Mayer than to John Wayne. His attempt at gangsta swagger doesn’t cut it either. There’s a weird racial aspect to the goo-suit: it gives Peter not just black impulses but a black (Afro-American) attitude. Bopping down the street to a hip-hop rhythm, he’s laughably gauche — a white kid playing at soul man, a good kid who’s not very good at being baaad.

Spider-Man 3 isn’t very up-to-date either; indeed, it’s defiantly anachronistic. Black-Peter is fond of 40s jive talk (“Now dig this”) and antique hipster choreography. Mary Jane, who harbors the outmoded ambition to be a Broadway musical star, sings a ballad (“They Say It’s Wonderful”) from Irving Berlin’s 1946 show Annie Get Your Gun. The film’s main emotional points are loyalty to your parents, or parent figures, and fidelity to your friends — the lessons of the uber-square Andy Hardy movies from the 40s. And Spidey 3, like the first film in the series, is a kind of remake of the mid-50s Rebel Without a Cause, in which a mixed-up kid must leave home to create a more satisfying surrogate family, with a pretty girl and another lonely boy.

Mary Jane — M.J. — is the ostensible focus of Peter’s yearnings. But except for her showbiz career (which suggests she wants the kind of public recognition that’s showered on him), her worries don’t mirror his. For M.J. has a crush on herself. When she asks Peter, “Do you love me?” the implied tag is “…as much as I love me?” An action film needs a love interest, if only for the hero to untie her from the railroad tracks, but not one who’s a narcissist. And M.J. is way more self-absorbed than the movie is M.J.-absorbed.

Fact is, the Spider-Man love story has grown older without maturing. In their early 20s, Peter and M.J. are like a middle-aged couple; he’s too consumed by work to pay attention to her hopes for a career. The pair’s attraction is assumed rather than displayed. That’s why the film’s one slice of heterosexual sizzle is the kiss between M.J. and the smitten Harry — the girl’s mouth tastes like strawberries to her erstwhile beau. Peter’s dilemmas may be internalized; but Harry’s love, like his rancor, is volcanic.

SPIDEY’S SOFT SIDE

There’s one villain who enjoys the job: Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), a.k.a. Venom. “I like being bad,” he exults. “It makes me happy.” The third of Peter’s rivals, Eddie-Venom is the reckless spirit of what teens would do if they dared, if there were no consequences, no censorious adult monitoring them. His tone of impish hell-raising seems out of place amid all the agonizing analysands — Peter-Spider, Flint-Sandman and Harry-Goblin — seeking to purge their inner demons, receive absolution for their sins. In this very serious movie, only Grace and Raimi regular Bruce Campbell, in a nice cameo as a varry Franch maitre d’, seem to be having the outsize fun normally associated with comic-book capers.

Raimi made his cult rep with the two Evil Dead horror films and the comix-inspired Darkman. But he’s gone sensitive before, as in the Kevin Costner baseball drama For Love of the Game. In the last two Spidey films he’s teamed with screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who in a 40-year career has scripted such weepies as The Sterile Cuckoo, Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, Bobby Deerfield, Julia, Ordinary People, Dominick and Eugene, White Palace, Anywhere But Here and Unfaithful. The rules for Spider-Man 3 are closer to the ones for those wayward domestic romances than to action-movie guidelines. Except for one thing: the love and friendship drama is about the men.

That sounds out of synch with the prevailing tone of pop culture, where sentiment has been largely banished, in favor of the male attitudes of cool, tough and ironic rule. Where can mass-moviegoers find release for their tenderer feelings? Only at dozens of inspirational sports movies, where guys (on screen and in the audience) get to cry and cheer and win. And, this weekend, at Spider-Man 3.

I’ve often complained on this site about how Hollywood movies ignore women, or turn them into figures of fem-machismo. Now I see that, in the burliest genres, men’s roles are being feminized. Peter Parker may be affianced to M.J., but their love seems pretty shallow and perfunctory. His most intense relationship is with Harry, his friend and surrogate brother — someone to try to talk sense to, to banter and battle with, to caress lovingly when he’s hurt.

Science tells us that, within the next few decades, women will be able to reproduce without men; guys will be obsolete. It’ll be different at the plexes, though. You can bet that, years from now, Spider-Man 13 will be tracking a mid-life Peter through more rocky relationships with other difficult males, and being stalwartly sensitive about it all. If movie men are getting in touch with their female side, who needs movie women?