Spider-Man 2

by Peter Tonguette

Peter Tonguette is a staff writer for The Film Journal. His writing has also appeared in Senses of Cinema and Bright Lights Film Journal. You can visit Peter Tonguette's personal review site here. He is also a founding member of the Central Ohio Film Critics Association (COFCA).

When critics invoke Richard Lester's glorious Superman II by way of describing Sam Raimi's aims in Spider-Man 2, the comparison does not flatter the Raimi film. Almost unquestionably Lester's last great movie, Superman II asked the audience to contemplate what was most desirous in a superhero: devotion to the world or devotion to love. Superman II's mournful answer is that the hero must remain devoted to the world at the expense of his personal honesty and even his love for Lois Lane. "Melancholy" is a good way to describe the emotions evoked in the film's conclusion.

The screenwriters of Spider-Man 2 must have studied Superman II long and hard, for its story line echoes the earlier film in many ways. But even so, they come up short. Midway through the film, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) gives up his double life as Spider-Man, only to return at a moment of great peril; but there is nothing of the (seemingly contradictory) angst and honor that Clark Kent/Superman expresses when he makes the same decision in Superman II. In Spider-Man 2, Raimi is unable to transform Peter's decision into anything but another mechanical twist of the plot. Lester proved how concentrated he was on the emotional core of the film when he revealed that he chose to film Lois' tearful good-bye to Superman (the moment during which Clark kisses Lois, thus erasing Lois' knowledge of Clark's identity as Superman) at a distressing moment for Kidder in her personal life. As he explained to Steven Soderbergh in their interview book, "Getting Away With It," "Again, it was one of those manipulative things, she came in and was in uncontrollable despair. Problems with her husband and her child. And I said, 'You shouldn't work at all, there's no reason why you have to, we'll find something else to do.' She said, 'No, I don't want to be alone, I want to be here, I want to work, I've got to get my mind off of it.' We just switched scenes to the one where she has to accept that the affair with Superman isn't going to work […] We shot that scene, and she was so out of it and so emotionally distraught that it was really a lovely performance and very moving in its own way."

I quote this anecdote at such length to demonstrate how profoundly we are made to care about Lois and Superman in Lester's film, rendering the comparative hollowness of the characterizations in Spider-Man 2 even more dispiriting. A comic book movie needn't simply be about big effects or hero worship. Lester proved this (as did Ang Lee in the less successful, but still interesting Hulk.) But while Raimi's screenwriters imitate the form of Superman II, the director doesn't allow us into the hearts of Peter Parker, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), or their emotional entanglements. To his credit, he does achieve a few elegant moments a few moments, such as a montage sequence set to "Raindrops Falling On My Head" as Peter, having at this point renounced Spider-Man, enjoys the life of an average, slightly nerdish New York college student in the year 2004. I was amused by what I took to be an homage to the wedding scene in Mike Nichols' The Graduate in a climactic sequence. But these are ultimately marginal diversions.

The film not only lacks the emotional range of Superman II, but also its filmmaking prowess. While undeniably efficient in its action sequences and good-looking in every way, nowhere does Raimi prove he is Lester's equal in terms of a grasp of mise-en-scene. He also seems unaware of how a truly personal mise-en-scene would work wonders on his material. Lester's agile cutting between wide shots and close-shots (which serve as visual punctuation marks) was imported directly from his other work. The result was one of his most powerful films, one in which the promising screenplay was filtered through a wonderful filmmaker's unique eye. For all of the flashiness of some of Raimi's set-pieces, his own "unique eye" is strangely absent.