Spider-Man as Everyman

Endearing Toby Maguire and Kirsten Dunst, the sexiest superhero's girlfriend ever, shine in this low-key but charming blockbuster.

By Charles Taylor

May 3, 2002 | The first "Spider-Man" comics, by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, had a modest, quotidian feel. The simple plots and familiar settings -- high school, home, the big city -- seemed especially suited to the story of a nerd who, thanks to a bite from a radioactive spider, gains superpowers and becomes the web-slinging crime fighter.

That's the tone the new "Spider-Man," directed by Sam Raimi from a script by David Koepp, aims to replicate. There's nothing in "Spider-Man" to match the delirious Wagnerian grandeur of Tim Burton's "Batman," or the hard, gleaming surfaces and combination of melancholic undertow and propulsive motion that suited "X-Men" so well. Raimi doesn't try to transcend the material or give it a large-scale operatic lushness. Set in Queens, where Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) lives with his Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) and Aunt May (Rosemary Harris), and Manhattan, where he works as a photographer for the Daily Bugle and swings from skyscraper to skyscraper in his guise as Spider-Man, the movie serves its source material.

Episodically told, the picture isn't especially thrilling, and its moments of visual glory are less than you might want. What holds the movie together is its modest, sweet spirit. It's easy to forgive the flaws in a big-budget comic-book blockbuster when the picture displays the affection and decency (toward its characters as well as the audience) that "Spider-Man" does. Raimi isn't out to bash us over the head, and he directs action sequences so you can actually tell what's going on in them (whereas most contemporary action movies are visual gibberish). If "Spider-Man" isn't the dark dazzler other directors have achieved in comic book movies, it's also not a cheat. "Spider-Man" is a movie made by honorable people who want to do good work (as opposed to a pretext for merchandising tie-ins), and there's nothing crass or cynical about the ways in which it falls short.

The biggest thing "Spider-Man" has going for it is the charm of its two young leads, Maguire and Kirsten Dunst, who plays Mary Jane, the girl next door whom Peter has pined for since they were kids. Reportedly, Raimi had to fight the studio to cast Maguire, who wasn't their idea of an action hero. It would be sheer foolishness to expect studio execs to actually know something about the movie they were financing, and Maguire is a perfect piece of casting. The Peter Parker of the comics is a slight, bespectacled bookworm, picked on by the other kids, and a dutiful nephew to the aunt and uncle who raised him.

Peter is the opposite of Superman who, in the guise of Clark Kent, was a suave man playing a wimp (the quality that Christopher Reeve, with his ace timing, caught so well). Peter really is a wimp. Being Spider-Man allows him to live out his fantasies of being cool; it puts him in tune with his inner wiseass. Casting a musclebound, conventionally good-looking stud in the role would have canceled that tension and given the audience no reason to root for him.

Maguire, who, behind his perpetually dazed expression, understands how to play sly comedy, wins us over immediately. He's like the 98-pound weakling who got sand kicked in his face in those old comic-book ads, only with a canny, ironic sense of his newfound powers. Maguire uses that weird curved smile of his (it always seems to start on one side of his mouth and slowly spread to the rest of his face) to convey the pleasure of a science whiz seeing an experiment go spectacularly right. His big blue unblinking eyes seem to open wider when there are more wonders to take in.

Koepp and Raimi do some sly comedy of their own in the scenes where Peter tries to get his web-spinning abilities under control. The gummy white fluid that shoots out of his wrists becomes a metaphor for the other thing that teenage boys often can't control. And Koepp has provided Maguire with some dandy repartee as Peter invokes every superhero slogan he can remember ("Sha-zam!" and so on) to take charge of the webs as they fire wide of their target.

One of the things that makes Spider-Man difficult for an actor is that, unlike Superman or the X-Men or even Batman, his entire face is hidden behind a mask. Wisely, Raimi and Koepp keep those scenes brief. When Maguire is in costume he uses that peculiar voice of his, something of a high, lilting croak, a voice that seems to find each joke in the course of telling it, to remind us of the guy underneath. In the climax, when Spidey's mask is half torn off, we get to see both that unblinking weblike visage and Peter's own scared countenance side by side. It's an elegant little visual metaphor for the divisions in the character.

Maguire does some wonderful physical work. When we first see Peter shinny up a wall, he affects a creepy-crawly contortionism that suggests something not quite human. And he's possessed of his own loopy ardor. The moment where he declares his feelings to Mary Jane, fixing her with those blue peepers, feels like it comes out in a single breath, and yet isn't rushed. It has the enticing and slightly unsettling romanticism of someone ushering his loved one into his rich fantasy life.

Next Page: Kirsten Dunst as your girlfriend: Clark Kent should be so lucky!

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