The New Superhero Movie Gold Standard

Rating: 9/10 (4 May 2002)

A while back, I wrote a review of 1989's BATMAN, where I called it "The Gold Standard of Superhero Movies".
I now have a new Gold Standard.
SPIDER-MAN, last of the big name superheroes to get his own movie, had an 18-year struggle to reach the big screen. Accordingly, this movie had almost impossible expectations to live up to--yet amazingly, the film not only lives up to them but surpasses them all.
Tobey Maguire is dead-on perfect as Peter Parker, and we watch his transformation from geek to freak to superhero with wonder and joy and heartbreak. Sam Raimi fought Sony tooth-and-nail for Maguire as his first choice, and like Tim Burton fighting for Michael Keaton 13 years ago, we the viewer in viewing the final result now understand the director's loyalty. Maguire's performance is subtle yet commanding. He takes hold of Peter and immerses himself thoroughly into the role. It would have been a huge mistake to cast Spider-Man and retrofit him into the Peter Parker role; by casting Peter Parker and having him grow into Spider-Man, the complexities of Stan Lee's groundbreaking hero shine through Maguire's magnificently expressive blue eyes.
Right up there with him is Willem Dafoe as Norman Osborne, ambitious Dr. Jeckyl-esque scientist driven mad by his lust for power in the Defense contracting industry and truly driven mad by his performance enhancement chemicals, which bring out the Mr. Hyde within him. At no point do you detect that Dafoe is in danger of going over the top with this performance; in fact, just the opposite occurs. Dafoe is so tightly controlled with his performance that we hang on the edges of our seats waiting for him to snap, and snap he does. His conversation with the mirror in his study is perfectly done, a snapshot of the entire range of complexity and subtlety and rage and fear in his performance.
Kirsten Dunst is beautiful and talented as MJ, but one wishes some of the scenes showing her own growth and transformation from abused teen to trophy girlfriend to independent thinker that were in earlier cuts had been kept. But Dunst makes up for it with her spunk and zest, and that upside down kiss with Spidey in the rain may be the hottest thing ever put on screen.
The rest of the cast is first-rate--Cliff Robertson as Uncle Ben, the catalyst for Peter's life work; Rosemary Harris as doting Aunt May; James Franco as Harry Osborne, whose strained relationship with his father forms one of the many complex triangles in this film; J.K. Simmons stealing every scene he's in as J. Jonah Jameson, who'll make Spiderman famous (or infamous).
Raimi's direction is fast-paced and furious, and borrows extensively from much of his earlier work (the entire Peter-designs-his-costume sequence came almost straight from DARKMAN, a much underappreciated film), and manages a strange balancing act: We know we're watching a comic book come to life, but never once do we forget that the comic book that has come to life is one of Marvel's most groundbreaking and complex works, with characters who are real and lives that are full of anguish and pain.
One scene in particular crystalizes the movie's power: As the Parker and Osborne families gather in Peter and Harry's Manhattan loft to celebrate Thanksgiving, everyone there--Peter, Harry, Norman, Aunt May, and MJ--has an agenda. Everyone's agenda is hidden at the beginning of the meal. But by its end, in onion-skin layers peeling away to reveal raw, acidic, damaging underlayers, everyone's agenda is exposed, and no one is what they seemed when the scene started. The exposition in this one scene drives the entire last half-hour of the film.
The film isn't perfect--there are moments when the pace drags a bit; the inevitable "join me" confrontation between villain Green Goblin and Spider-Man is not up to what it could be; some scenes cut from the film's final version really needed to be there and will hopefully be there on DVD--but it blows away every other comic book film I've ever seen. Go see it.