**½/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor
screenplay by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker & S.J. Clarkson
directed by S.J. Clarkson
by Walter Chaw S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web is a rare and specific variety of disaster, which is interesting because it’s largely centred around a rare and specific variety of spider. That is to say, not “interesting” so much as unintentionally ironic or something. Rain on your wedding day, 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, you know? The mass-appealing, notes-driven, “for dummies,” not-entirely-accurate pop-cultural definition of a literary conceit. This reminds me of the swoony, heartthrob moment where Ethan Hawke defines “irony” perfectly in Reality Bites. I don’t actually remember what he says, though, because I haven’t seen that movie since its 1994 release–about ten years before the events of Madame Web, the screen debut of Marvel mutant Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), who’s named after the Greek archetype who can see the future but no one listens to her and Marc Webb, director of the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies. Just kidding. She’s named Webb because spiders spin them, with an extra “b” to throw you off the trail but not so violently that you don’t know it’s fucking with you. Madame Web (one “b,” because the picture is more invested in making sure you know it’s related to the lucrative Spider-Man franchise than in being such a tedious asshole) opens in 1973, with Cassandra’s super-pregnant mom Constance (Kerry Bishé) tromping around the South American rainforest like Sean Connery in Medicine Man in search of a super-spider when…okay, that’s enough of that. Anyway, 30 years later, Cassandra is a paramedic who can sometimes see the future, but nobody believes her. You might have deduced that by her name is all I’m saying.
Madame Web is, on one level, a Powerpuff Girls hangout flick. On another level, it’s that party where you met a girl who was so much sharper than you that you could never entirely figure out when and how she was castrating you, although it was constant and brutal and you learned maybe you were into the humiliation thing but she got bored and now you’re writing about her 30 years later. Every Dakota Johnson line-reading in this film is a balls-shrivelling, meme-in-the-making fusillade of ice-cold, patronizing derision. She is a human wrecking ball of unusual precision. There’s a scene at the midway point of Madame Web where Cassandra reads her dead mother’s journal: “Peptides… More peptides… Ah, here it is: spider-people. Las Araňas.” Then, to her cat, she says, “Have you ever heard of Los Araňas? Me neither.” She pronounces “Las Araňas” like that one remote anchor on your local news broadcast does–like you might if you were being a relentless son-of-a-bitch working something out of your front teeth as you carefully savoured each syllable for maximum “I’m pronouncing this eleventh-grade honours-Spanish correctly, what’s your problem?” She reads on to discover that they can move around like spiders, these Las Araňas, and, her deep blue eyes registering the shock (she is not shocked) of understanding (she already understands), she looks offscreen left and stage-whispers, “Like ceiling guy!” She’s referring to the villain of Madame Web, Ezekiel Sims (French-Algerian actor Tahar Rahim), who appears to her in visions walking on the ceiling. The way she says it makes my scrotum retract all the way up into my body cavity. I’ve been spoken to that way before, and those bits don’t grow back, my friends.
Dakota Johnson knows this scene is ridiculous. She knows it is housed in a ridiculous film. She is smarter than her own character, of course, but she is also smarter than anyone who worked on Madame Web and most of the people watching it, including me. Comprising the movie’s MacGuffin are three young women (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor) Cassandra must protect from Ezekiel. She does this by catching glimpses of them being brutally murdered in a changeable future, then changing the future. Better might have been her sitting in a recliner opposite Ezekiel in a nice conversation nook and ripping his self-esteem out of his nose like a Pharaoh’s mortician armed with a bent wire made of arched-brow cremaster and silken-garrote condescension. Later, Sweeney’s Julia Cornwall looks at a picture of Cassandra’s mom and says, “She’s really pretty,” and Johnson offers the kind of thin-lipped smile that shuts down bars. I’ve experienced performances like this before, generally by people like Joan Crawford or Bette Davis in the last few steps of their career, when they were cast as psycho-biddies in poverty productions. Performances that are not performances. Performances that are measured in the recoil of every other celestial body in the vicinity from the gravity tides produced by the massive ego-density of artists who have accumulated so much inertial confidence throughout their lives and careers that they are more impenetrable than black holes. Dakota Johnson is as different from you as you are from a starfish. There is nothing the same about how you were raised and thus how you understand and experience the world. I want to be a satellite in her orbit just to observe her and occasionally squeal, “Oh no she didn’t!” when she cuts someone off at the knees with the effort a sociopathic child exerts ripping wings off a fly. I want to be the Carl Sagan to her cosmos.
