Now Showing: Along Came A Spider • The Center of the World

Now Showing
Candid Reviews of Movies Just Hitting The Big Screen

by Cole Smithey

Along Came A Spider

After a rip roaring opening car chase scene that promises much more action and wit than the movie delivers, Along Came A Spider favors surprisingly futile plot twists over character and story development. Morgan Freeman returns to the role of forensic psychologist detective Dr. Alex Cross from another James Patterson novel made celluloid, Kiss The Girls. Along Came a Spider is a movie that’s constantly trying to razzle dazzle the audience with jarring narrative jumps and divisive bouts of exposition. Morgan Freeman does a respectable job of single-handedly holding the film together as an unshakable actor capable of youthful athleticism, dignified logic, and emotional depths far greater than the script provides. Freeman is the sole reason to see this otherwise unsatisfying exploitation thriller.

Months after loosing a police partner in a sting operation gone bad, Cross is taunted back into action when private High School teacher Gary Soneji (Michael Wincott - Basquiat) dodges two years worth of Secret Service surveillance to kidnap a senator’s daughter from the well guarded confines of a Washington D.C. school. Soneji is a disguise artist scoundrel left over from the cold war days of the “Mission Impossible” television show because, as it turns out, he’s been painstakingly applying prosthetic make-up everyday for two years to set up a kidnapping that’s really just a bait for another abduction that will bring him fame comparable to the ‘crime of the century’ Lindbergh baby-snatching case. But Soneji also leaves behind obvious clues that exhibit his desire to be collared by Alex Cross, the man he believes to be his most astute opponent.

A trail of suspense thriller cliches is laid down so meticulously that you can almost hear the screenwriter sweating over how to kick sand over the film’s predictable plot to keep the audience’s attention. Cross teams up with Secret Service agent Jezzie Flannigan (Monica Potter - Patch Adams) after her humiliating debacle as the agent in charge of a three year surveillance effort at protecting the children of high profile American and foreign politicians. Forget that such an expensive stake-out operation would cost taxpayers a prohibitive amount of money. Perhaps we are to believe that the kids’ parents are footing the bill in some under the table deal with the U.S. Secret Service. What’s important is that Jezzie forces her way into Cross’s investigation as his partner in recovering the girl and capturing Soneji.
The easy-on-the-eyes Monica Potter gives a competent performance that ultimately misses because her character isn’t given that extra scene or two that would give the audience a glimpse of what her character is capable of doing. As the plot demands on her character shift, Potter gets in over her head in making choices that would compensate for the twisting transitions.

Director Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors) is visibly a capable director trying to better his career with a big studio picture that will look good on his resume regardless of how the movie does at the box office due primarily to the presence of Morgan Freeman. The same director who commanded above such above average movies as Mulholland Falls and The Edge is caught in Hollywood’s constant drought of worthy material.
The pleasures in Spider come from watching Alex Cross struggle with his own psyche in solving a hollow crime. Freeman could open a Broadway show built around him reading a phone book because he has a personal motivation that is never at peace. Unlike lesser actors like Tom Hanks or Whoopi Goldberg who attempt to gesture in the generous direction that Freeman constantly confirms, the 63 year-old actor succeeds because he grapples with things he doesn’t know rather than glowing over some self-possessed humanitarian blissfulness. Morgan Freeman is a uniquely American actor who shares with audiences some of the inestimable values he’s saved for himself as a human being. That’s the golden quality of Freeman’s powerful acting; he always gives away a little bit of the stuff he’s been saving up from the day he was born.

The Center of the World

Director Wayne Wang’s unreserved take on a specific slice of American intimacy in an age of computer obsessed males and post feminist nihilistic females rings with a perfectly hollow pitch that’s a digital video punch to the solar plexus. Set primarily in Las Vegas, Wang (The Chinese Box) explores the ramifications of a sexual arrangement between Richard Longman (Peter Sarsgaard - Boys Don’t Cry), a newly wealthy twenty something computer engineer, and Florence (Molly Parker - Sunshine), a drummer in an all chic punk band and stripper at a lap dance bar called ‘Pandora’s Box.’ Shot entirely on digital video using different types of cameras, the movie is a modern cross between Carnal Knowledge and Last Tango In Paris for the dot com generation. Without missing a beat, Richard and Flo settle into a short and doomed affair that brings fresh emotional scars to their already damaged identities.

Flo and Richard meet at a Bay Area coffee shop and their mutual attraction quickly turns into a power struggle as Richard visits the strip club to have Flo do her standard sexy but clinical lap dance for him. Richard soon finds that Flo is intimately unavailable, but insists on attempting to court her by offering her $10,000 to go to Las Vegas with him for three days. Flo’s caustic response is a show stopper. She protests that she is not a prostitute but rattles off conditions that there will be ‘no kissing on the mouth, no talk of feelings, no penetration and predetermined hours of 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.’ Richard puts up surprisingly little fight in conceding to Flo’s illogical demands considering that there is an attraction between them, and because Flo so obviously sells herself like a prostitute in denial.

Recovering from the recent death of his father, Richard has retreated into his isolated world of computers, concentrating on their use as a sexual aid over further pursuing his wealth inducing work with IPOs. Searching for a human connection, Richard leaps at the first person to come along because he’s so accustomed to the near instant gratification of summoning up whatever he desires with his computer. Richard is so love starved for the human touch that he desperately pursues the first young woman who comes along.

The first scenes in The Center of The World reveal an artificial Las Vegas imitation of a Venetian waterway that lean toward an ostensibly European story before colliding with romantic images with Vegas’ fake New York skyline. It’s a perfect introduction into the willing suspension of disbelief that Richard operates his life from. Richard’s computer puts him at the ‘center of the world,’ but it’s not the physical world that it pretends to be. Even Richard’s ideal courtship location of Las Vegas reveals an uncomfortable association with what he thinks of as real or romantic.

But it’s in Flo’s three nightly visits into Richard’s hotel room, from her adjoining suite, that natural laws of sexual communication are forged, crossed, and ultimately betrayed. One by one, Flo’s rules for the couple’s interaction are broken, until finally the act of intercourse is performed in the stark intentions at the core each person’s inability to express themselves sexually, much less to love one another.

The Center of the World is a movie that stays with you because it is audaciously current in the realm of American sexual identities, but also because of Parker’s and Sarsgaard’s laid open performances. It’s a simple, straightforward, sexually explicit movie that lets its characters make gross mistakes that audiences will interpret with all of the empathy and alienation that these two brave actors allow. Wang’s non-judgmental style lets the story and characters breath in a way that opens the movie up to repeated viewing although it’s not a comfortable film. Wayne Wang, who also directed The Joy Luck Club and Smoke, is one of the world’s most interesting film directors because he shows cords of humanity along side the strands emotional tyranny that prevent harmony. Wang’s films can be viewed as carrying off the kind of extended cross-social ensembles that Wim Wenders (The End of Violence) has repeatedly attempted but never achieved. However Wang’s work rates more among the integrity of Visconti or Truffaut.