As the title character in The Amazing Spider-Man, the young actor, who previously made an impression as Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, commands an inhumanly svelte torso, like a ballet dancer’s, with long spindly limbs that seem both frenetic and graceful in motion. Unmasked, as Spidey’s hapless alter-ego Peter Parker, Garfield’s delicate features often wear a smile, but it’s a bleak one, as of resignation to disappointment in love.
Spider-Man, Sam Raimi’s excellent rendering of the Marvel Comics saga with Tobey Maguire as the superhero, was released back in the dimly remembered bygone year 2002, so The Amazing Spider-Man is a “reboot,” a new retelling of Spidey’s origin story. As before, Parker is a lovelorn high school kid who gets bitten by an irradiated spider, and soon finds himself super-strong, able to climb walls and swing from Manhattan skyscrapers via webs slung from dispensers at his wrists, and imbued with a “Spidey-Sense” of impending danger. A momentary indifference to a crime he witnesses leads to a personal tragedy, thus teaching him that with great power comes...
…well, if you’re more than passingly interested in Spider-Man, you probably already know that with great power comes great responsibility. You aren’t alone if you wonder why it’s now thought essential to laboriously re-do the origin of a superhero, or even a near-super-hero like James Bond or Captain Kirk, just because it’s deemed time to re-cast the role with a younger actor.
Garfield makes a splendid Peter Parker, particularly adept at the character’s tragic side, and while I thought he was perhaps slightly less comfortable with the smartass quips as Spider-Man, the performance is still an impressive success. But I really think audiences could have accepted the change of leading man without the obsessive do-over. Because of the early point in the narrative, characters like J. Jonah Jameson or Norman or Harry Osborn are kept offstage—presumably for the sequels. But these figures account for some of the Spider-Man atmosphere, as does the sense that Spidey’s an accepted part of the New York scene. You may find the prospect of having to go through Peter Parker’s adolescence again only marginally less wearying than that of having to go through your own.
Or maybe that’s just me; the film is aimed, after all, at those who haven’t gone through their own yet, and Peter Parker is an eternal self-projection for angst-ridden youth. Also, the re-do is, at least, well re-done, under the direction of Marc Webb (yeah, I know). A music-video specialist, Webb’s work here is smooth, fast and efficient, if less magical than Raimi’s. The movie really took off for me toward the end, when it’s finally time for Spidey to face-off against the movie’s supervillain, my favorite from the old comic: Dr. Curt Connors, aka The Lizard. The Doc, played by Rhys Ifans, is a scientist who, trying to re-grow his missing arm, takes a dose of lizard juice and turns into a rampaging reptilian megalomaniac, and he at the Webhead have a couple of fine scraps before their main event above Manhattan.
Ifans can be a striking presence—he even managed to keep his dignity as Oxford in the absurd Anonymous—but he seems a bit sheepish here, even though he was allowed a ripe moment in which he gets to quote Michelangelo’s great sonnet “The Silkworm”: (“…That, changing like the snake, I might be free/To cast the flesh wherein I dwell confined…”). The other performances are strong, however: Emma Stone as Peter’s beloved Gwen Stacy, Denis Leary at his nettled best as her police captain father, Campbell Scott in the small role of Peter’s dad, and Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Uncle Ben and Aunt May—that’s right, Gidget and the Flying Nun is now of an age to play Aunt May.
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