Spider-Man

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man is a good superhero film because it takes Peter Parker’s awkwardness seriously, without treating every disappointment as a tragedy. There is pleasure in the transformation, and some selfishness in what Peter wants from it. Raimi allows both, leaving room for a hero who still has some growing up to do. The action is uneven, but the young man at its centre is worth spending an evening with.

Tobey Maguire is the main reason. He makes Peter’s sensitivity appealing without tidying away the neediness, and his embarrassment has none of the calculation of an actor asking to be found endearing. David Koepp’s screenplay gives him a useful mixture of decent impulses and self-interest, which Maguire keeps visible even when the story starts handing him larger problems. The early humour works because gaining extraordinary abilities has not made Peter any better at being comfortable with himself.

Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson helps give the romance enough weight to compete with the superhero business. Dunst brings a directness that stops Maguire’s hesitancy becoming the only note in their scenes, and Raimi lets attraction remain awkward. We were touched by Maguire’s embarrassment in these exchanges, because his wish to be liked feels painfully ordinary. The film spends enough time on that wish for the romance to matter when the spectacle threatens to crowd everything else out.

Willem Dafoe has fewer opportunities as Norman Osborn and the Green Goblin. His relish keeps the villain watchable, but Koepp supplies a more routine threat than this particular hero deserves, and the confrontations gradually become predictable in shape. We do not need every superhero adversary to be a psychological case study; we do need the danger to become more involving as the film goes on. Raimi gets intermittent excitement from these encounters without sustaining much anxiety about them.

Don Burgess’s cinematography works best when there are faces to attend to, giving the romantic scenes a welcome lack of fuss. Neil Spisak’s production design keeps the action settings readable, though they rarely hold our attention for themselves. The digital movement is a larger problem: bodies travel through space with too little apparent weight, and impacts consequently lose their force. We can follow a collision without quite believing that it hurts. For a film so attentive to Peter’s vulnerability, that makes the fights disappointingly easy to sit through.

Editors Bob Murawski and Arthur Coburn give the early comedy a brisk rhythm, with enough breathing space for Maguire’s discomfort to register. The repeated shifts into combat are less rewarding, and the later stretches feel longer than their incidents warrant. Danny Elfman’s music supplies a firm sense of heroism, although its insistence can make the action feel more dutiful. A stronger sense of physical danger would have done more for these sequences.

As a coming-of-age adventure, Spider-Man understands why an uncertain young person might want extraordinary powers, and why having them would not settle everything. That gives it something worth caring about within a genre that can become impatient with ordinary feelings. The reservations matter, especially for anyone chiefly interested in the fights. Choose it for Maguire, and do not expect every battle to justify interrupting him.