Two-Legged Freak

How is Spider-Man 2? When people asked that question a couple days after a press screening, I replied, "About as good as Spider-Man 2 can be." But after more days had passed, I realized how condescending that answer sounded. It was an ivory-tower reply, poisoned by unspoken qualifiers, like Roger Ebert's declaring, "This may be the best superhero movie I've ever seen."

Director Sam Raimi's sequel to his 2002 original isn't great pop art. But there's artistry in it-artistry that's likely to be overlooked because it's based on comics. It's a sweet American myth, retold with style, sincerity and cheer. It's Raimi's gentlest, funniest movie-as nutty-sincere as good Tim Burton-and it might be star Tobey Maguire's best work as well. Maguire's seeming wrongness for this superhero role-diminutive body, super-sensitive facial expressions, soft, reedy voice-is what makes him perfect. Peter Parker is Ben Braddock in The Graduate with superpowers. Maguire's onscreen during most of the picture, and at every moment, you feel what he's thinking.

Spider-Man 2 preserves the goofy, playful mood of the original and fixes some (but not all) of its flaws. The plot once again pits hero Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, against a deranged bad guy. This time it's Dr. Octopus (Alfred Molina), a cold-fusion scientist whose body merges with mechanical tentacles during a botched experiment. But the real action is internal. Like Superman II, the film asks what happens when a hero rejects his destiny and tries to live a "normal" life. During the film's first half, Peter seems to be suffering an unnamed malaise; he's uncoordinated, and his webbing doesn't work as reliably as it used to. He's off his game, and he's starting to wonder if being Spider-Man is the fulfillment of a cosmic destiny or a curse that's stopping him from being happy.

The film doesn't insult our intelligence by asking us to wonder if Peter will give up being Spider-Man for good; it's more interested in exploring his very good reasons for giving up, and his equally good reasons for reversing his decision. Snobs will dismiss Peter's soul-searching as pro forma comic book stuff. But moviegoers brave enough to put aside preconceived notions of "respectable" entertainment-particularly viewers whose lives aren't as soft and blinkered as the average film critic's-will connect with Peter's struggle to balance his secret life against his outward daily existence, and respond to it. "Am I not supposed to have what I want, what I need?" Peter asks himself, in a voice-over soliloquy. "What am I supposed to do?"

Raimi and screenwriter Alvin Sargent (Ordinary People) refine Spidey's status as the most American of superheroes. He's not an omnipotent, immigrant royal who has benevolently decided to look out for the little people (Superman), or a psychotic vigilante living off inherited wealth (Batman), but a blue-collar wiseass from Queens named Peter Parker. He lives with his widowed Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) and attends Columbia on financial aid. He has a physically demanding but creatively unsatisfying job peddling freelance photos to the Daily Bugle, where his Neanderthal editor, J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), mocks him for photographing anything that's not violent or scandalous. He's disorganized, scatterbrained and chronically late, and he's so broke that when he makes a pay phone call and his three minutes run out, he can't dig up another quarter to keep the conversation going.

Peter wasn't always society's champion. He used to be as self-interested as the next guy. He didn't ask for superpowers; they were an affliction brought on by a radioactive spider bite. He created his new identity himself, using pens, pencils and a sketchbook-a proud acknowledgment of the tale's comic book origins, and a trope that reflects American ideals of reinvention and self-determination. Peter first posed as Spider-Man during an el cheapo wrestling exhibition where he hoped to win enough money to buy a car and take the cute girl next door, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), out on dates. After a slimy promoter stiffed Peter out of his winnings, Peter refused to stop an armed robber from jacking the guy, and that same robber killed Peter's beloved Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) during a car theft, burdening Peter with overwhelming guilt and pushing him to choose heroism over villainy (or worse, neutrality).

Most intriguing of all, Spider-Man is the first postmodern superhero-the first to realize that fighting crime in tights is surreal, and that the public's thirst for mythic heroes is both a need and a sickness. The quips Peter doles out in fight scenes are self-aware, enclosed by implied quote marks. It's as if he's thinking, "This whole thing is so weird, why not add repartee?"

Spider-Man 2 finds Peter struggling to balance his secret identity with his daily life as a college student, a newspaper photographer, a devoted surrogate son to Aunt May and a half-assed suitor of actress-model Mary Jane, who's currently wowing them on Broadway in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. (Dunst is unconvincing as a stage sensation, but the choice of play-about a double life-is still a nice touch.) He's a superhero for the age of multitasking and McJobs-a guy whose energies are so dispersed that he barely knows what day it is. He adores Mary Jane and worships her from afar. At the urging of Doc Ock-the subject of Peter's research paper, and a dapper sweetheart that dotes on his wife-Peter studies poetry to make himself more charming, which leads to the marvelous image of Peter reading "The Song of Hiawatha" at the laundromat while his clothes turn pink in the washer.

Somehow Peter hasn't gotten around to seeing Earnest, which every important person in Mary Jane's life has already done. When Peter finally does make an effort to see it, he's waylaid by a crime in progress and arrives at the theater so late that the usher (Raimi regular Bruce Campbell) refuses to let him in. Later, he witnesses Mary Jane kissing her fiancee, the beefcake astronaut son of Peter's boss. In every way, life is passing him by. "It's wrong that we should be half alive, half of ourselves," Mary Jane tells Peter.

Thrilling, touching and sometimes swooningly romantic, Spider-Man 2 is a personal film made from junky material, as deserving of serious criticism as the gangster pictures, screwball comedies and B-westerns that inspired French film critics to create the Auteur theory a half-century ago. Like Raimi's Darkman and The Quick and the Dead, it is obsessed with sight and reflection (literal and otherwise), which befits a tale of a troubled hero forced to look at himself. The movie is packed with shots of eyes gazing upon objects of interest or obsession, and images captured in reflective surfaces (metal, mirrors, windows, tv screens, eyeballs). Moments of reverie are obliterated by explosions that shatter windowpanes, followed by point-of-view shots in which the disruptive force (Doc Ock, usually) is framed by jagged pieces of glass-a Hitchock-style visualization of insanity pulverizing the rational mind.

It may seem heretical to suggest that the Spider-Man films could have a message, even a worldview, but I think they do. Raimi is a Golden Rule sort of guy. In all of his movies, the need to dominate others is depicted as a sickness, a compulsion, practically a form of demonic possession; he presents evil and the urge to dominate as indistinguishable. Spider-Man villains aren't inherently bad people, but decent men who failed to resist the siren song of domination and became less human (and more machine-like). As envisioned by Raimi and his collaborators, both the Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus are seduced and overcome by the technology they're obsessed with mastering. Doc Ock's tentacles plug into his spinal column, take over his brain and feed dark thoughts into his ears. They're like shiny, whispering snakes.

Spider-Man 2 doesn't have the elegant shape of a great film. Like The Terminal (and most other summer blockbusters), it reaches a near-perfect endpoint, then keeps going for 20 more minutes. There are times when one is too aware of watching the second installment in a potentially endless franchise. The script positions James Franco's Harry Osborn, son of industrialist-turned-supervillain Green Goblin in the original, as the third film's bad guy so awkwardly that he might as well be wearing a t-shirt that reads, "Villain on deck." (A supporting turn by Dylan Baker as Peter's professor sets the stage for a fourth film pitting Spider-Man against another nemesis, The Lizard.) The action scenes, while expertly composed and edited, are just not as interesting as Peter's inner life. (The best is a chase/fight on what appears to be a nonexistent 2nd Ave. el train. The track mysteriously runs out at the water's edge, like a stretch of railway in a nightmare.) But these are minor gripes compared to the pleasures Raimi generates. Far less distinctive, likable films have become blockbusters. Spider-Man 2 didn't have to connect with people's lives to be a hit. But it does, and it's wonderful. o