When someone reboots a film franchise, as the makers of “The Amazing Spider-Man” have done, what are we meant to think of the original boot? The first “Spider-Man” came out in 2002, followed by its obligatory sequels in 2004 and 2007. If you are a twenty-year-old male of unvarnished social aptitude, those movies will seem like much-loved classics that have eaten up half your lifetime. They beg to be interpreted anew, just as Shakespeare’s history plays should be freshly staged by every generation. For those of us who are lavishly cobwebbed with time, however, the notion of yet another Spider-Man saga, this soon, does seem hasty, and I wish that the good people—or, at any rate, the patent lawyers—at Marvel Comics could at least have taken the opportunity to elide the intensely annoying hyphen in the title. Or does merely suggesting such a change make me a total ass-hole?
Our hero, Peter Parker, is played by Andrew Garfield—Tobey Maguire, the previous incumbent, having reached the unthinkable age of thirty-seven. Garfield was excellent as the hapless Eduardo Saverin in “The Social Network,” and he still bears the mournful traces of a smart kid who had to agree to an out-of-court settlement. If anything, he is rather too mournful. I know that years of sappy cinema have left me lachrymose-intolerant, but I really couldn’t understand why Garfield’s Bambi eyes kept glinting with a mist of tears. Peter lives in Queens with his Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field). His closest friend is a skateboard, which I guess is a step up from Mark Zuckerberg. As befits so many superheroes-in-waiting, Peter is bullied, and, if we never entirely shake off the sense that we are witnessing a complex, two-hundred-million-dollar revenge of the nerd, that also is a defining strain of the genre. At school, to his baffled delight, Peter gets to know Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone)—a classmate, allegedly seventeen years old, although for a while I was under the distinct impression that, despite her thigh-high socks, she was actually a teacher. Here, once more, is a calculated nod to the daydreams of a junior audience. Stone is twenty-three, a wise veteran of “Easy A” and “The Help,” but as Gwen she has to suffer a faintly demeaning reversion to virginal youth.
And so to the pudding of the plot. Peter makes contact with a one-armed colleague of his father’s, Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), whose status as a brilliant scientist is amply demonstrated by his white lab coat. “Wonderful things are coming, wonderful things!” he cries, like someone in a wonky hat who has just opened a chocolate factory. Dr. Connors wants to cure all ills, including his own disfigurement, by melding one species with another, and I had hoped that Ifans, a very funny Welshman, would use the same technique to splice his own personality onto the part, but the film’s director, Marc Webb, does not permit such levity in his fiend. Accidentally, with the aid of a magic serum, Dr. Connors renders himself part lizard, although the creepiest shot in the film is not of the beastly result—whose disappointingly blunt, unlizardish head resembles that of Ben Grimm, in “The Fantastic Four”—but of the simple shadow that he casts, like an approaching hunchback, in the tunnel of a New York sewer. And the best line comes as Peter warns a police captain (Denis Leary) of who, or what, is coming: “He has transformed himself into a giant lizard!” Leary pauses, with perfect timing and a face of stone, then replies, “Do I look like the mayor of Tokyo?”
We need more zingers like that. Instead, “The Amazing Spider-Man” adds its pennyworth to the scrawny ethical debate with which films of this kind like to pimp their own significance. Martin Sheen—who else?—gets to deliver the big speech about the responsibilities of the highly gifted. Meanwhile, for the benefit of the lowly brained, a company receptionist sees Peter looking for a visitor’s badge and asks, “Are you having trouble finding yourself?” It’s O.K., we get it. There remains, nonetheless, a conundrum that the film both provokes and dodges: by what fickle criterion do some men, when infused with genes from elsewhere in the animal kingdom, become pleasingly enhanced humans, while others turn into hideous mashups, with awkward consequences for their sex lives? Why does Peter Parker grow into a paragon of fortitude, clad in upmarket cycling gear, while Dr. Connors, or Jeff Goldblum’s fast-talking goof in “The Fly,” submits to dermatological outrages that no amount of cleanser mousse can soothe? If Webb had had the guts to pursue the truly inventive, and the biologically accurate, Peter would not have surprised Gwen at her bedroom window or shared a dreamy kiss. He would have crawled out of her drain and been beaten to death with a mop.
The climax occurs on the pointed peak of a high-rise, as if all that any film required, in the bid to top its predecessors, was to scrape the edge of the sky. But that site, like the summit of Everest, is surely crowded to the full by creatures from other films—everything from King Kong to Susan Sarandon’s majestic dragon, in “Enchanted,” who was far more sinuous, witty, and purple than anything Dr. Connors could devise. Spider-Man himself, wounded in the leg, hitches a ride on a succession of huge cranes, in a scene that even the most muscular of Soviet realists would have considered risible: Heroic crane operators of the world, unite! Bring down the slavering reptile of capitalism! By now, “The Amazing Spider-Man” is running out of nimbleness and fun, and the promise contained in its title seems ever more tendentious. There are joyous moments when we share Peter’s point of aerial view, through a sort of private Spidey-Cam, as he loops and soars through town, and there is one sequence, early on, that clangs with possibility, as Peter—endowed with powers that he can’t yet control—manages to trash a subway car, along with most of its inhabitants. Sadly, the implications of that spree are toyed with and cast aside. What a shame; the idea that to be rendered superhuman is neither some sombre moral privilege nor a queasy Faustian temptation but a prelude to ungovernable slapstick might be just what the genre needs. It would definitely tickle the new batch of ten-year-olds receiving their first hit of arachnomania. So, what will they have learned from this instructive film? One thing: if you want to grab a girl, as Peter does, you eject a strand of sticky stuff onto her from behind, then pull. Not true, kids. Don’t try it at home.
Can the human soul be stirred by hearing the Buggles? They are best known—or simply known—for their 1979 single “Video Killed the Radio Star,” which became the first music video ever played on MTV, in 1981. It came from their aptly named album “The Age of Plastic,” and there, you might think, it should have stayed. Yet here it is again, halfway through Sarah Polley’s new movie, “Take This Waltz,” blaring out over the Scrambler ride at the Centreville amusement park, in Toronto. We focus on two scramblees, Margot (Michelle Williams) and her neighbor Daniel (Luke Kirby), as they whip and whirl around and fall in love; how Polley conveys this through all the noise I don’t know, but she does. As the song stops, abruptly, and the lights grow dim and dusty, and some fat guy, in long shot, ushers them out of their pod, it feels like the end of the world. These two are completely Buggled.
Would that everything in the film, which charts this passion of Margot’s and the deflation of her marriage to Lou (Seth Rogen), delivered so natural a shock. Polley has a wonderful eye, not least for the waves of worry that pass over people’s faces, and she gets as much from Williams as she did from a radiant Julie Christie in “Away From Her” (2007). So rich is that visual yield, however, that it needs no verbal boost. Yet, from the moment that Margot says to Daniel, while sitting next to him on a plane, “I’m afraid of connections,” the dialogue strains and grunts so hard for effect that it threatens to pull a muscle. Your best option, perhaps, is to zone out from the implausible kinks in the setup—husband and wife seem to live a pretty fancy life, for instance, given that she is a non-writing writer and he creates recipes based exclusively on chicken. This will leave you free to savor the compositions and the melted-candy color schemes, which have far more kick and spice than Lou’s cacciatore. From the early closeup of turquoise toenails to the serene tableau of women, of every age and outline, showering and chatting after a swim, Polley shows that her real theme, her obsession, almost, is the body in time—how it tenses and eases, whether in the course of decades or in a single, camera-encircled rondeau of sex. Few of us would go as far as Geraldine (Sarah Silverman), Lou’s sister, with her cheerful claim, “I look in the mirror, I want to fuck myself,” but you know what she means. And you know it can’t last. ♦
