David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986) finds the director summarizing the themes and images of his early films before turning to more esoteric idioms in his subsequent career. Cronenberg has always been a capable director of actors, but this is the first of his films where that element moves into the forefront. Sure, there’s all the gore and weird science that fans of his early films could ever want, but all of that takes a backseat to the melodrama and tragedy of the character arcs. This is possibly a function of quality actors finally becoming available to him. For that matter, the framing of the story is ideal for actors. You have what is essentially a chamber piece, with three significant characters. You could stage it for the theater on one set (and, in preparing to write this, I find that Cronenberg has directed an opera based on the film). This is, famously, a “re-imagining” of the original 1958 film, though that has been overstated over the years. The seeds of this film’s narrative can be found in the little-seen Curse of the Fly (1965), in which the teleportation gimmick is used to create a host of deformities. Here, it’s given the sheen of twenty-odd years of biotechnological advances. But where that film--and the original 1958 film--are specifically about the gimmicks (characters are incidental), Cronenberg flips things around. This could be about any transforming disease. The director himself says it’s about aging, but you could just as easily view it from the perspective of a cancer patient or a man with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Fortunately for the audience, Cronenberg isn’t interested in the usual emotional landscape of the disease of the week film. He’s more interested in examining the disease itself. It’s a “disease with a purpose,” he proposes, and it has a transformative effect on the afflicted. The changes themselves are interesting, and because his hero is a scientist, he catalogues the changes like a scientist, fascinated by the novelty of it all.
Jeff Goldblum has always received the lion’s share of the acclaim for his performance as Seth Brundle, our not so mad scientist, which is proper, I suppose. He’s good in a difficult role that requires him to emote through layers of prosthesis. But the spotlight on Goldblum has tended to obscure Geena Davis’s contribution to the film, which is considerable. The movie is ostensibly told from her point of view (Cronenberg is not particularly disciplined about this here, but as a general rule this is true). While we are certainly privy to Brundle’s transformation out of her sight, it’s worth keeping in mind that hers is the only character with an interior life that is laid bare for the audience. We see the point of view of her dreams late in the film. We don’t get that from Brundle. The story is a two-pronged tragedy: there’s the tragedy of Brundle’s disintegration as the fly takes over, and there’s the tragedy of Veronica Quaife, watching her lover deteriorate until she has to euthanize him herself. All love stories are tragic, Cronenberg once said of this film: one lover dies in the end, or they drift out of love.
Topic: What was the last movie you watched? (Read 1791670 times)
