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Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna, Tonatiuh. Directed by Bill Condon

128 min.

Rating: 3 out of 4 stars

It’s a rarity these days to witness a musical of ambition, one that doesn’t merely coddle its songs, but allows them to be vessels for fantasy, memory, and pain all at once. Kiss of the Spider Woman lands with some bumps, but also soars, thanks to the film’s central conceit: a film-within-a-film that opens the characters up to Technicolor glamour and flight, even as they are imprisoned in a place of brutal reality.

Essentially the movie pivots on a classic clash of worlds: in an Argentine prison, two men, Valentín (Diego Luna) and Molina (Tonatiuh), are thrown together in a single cell. Valentín is a hardened political prisoner, damaged by torture, and ideologically pure. Molina is there on charges of “corrupting a minor” and is by far the more fragile and self-occupied of the two, a dreamer devoted to fantasy—specifically, a beautiful Hollywood diva called Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez). Molina wiles away his days in painstaking and loving detail about Ingrid’s life and adventures; at times the whole movie has the feeling of him whispering her life story in Valentín’s ear, to ward off their prison despair.

Condon’s take on this is rather different than other stage adaptations of the story, by cutting many of the songs in the “real world” of prison and by inverting the original: sustaining throughout the contrast between the dismal and dangerous confines of the prison world, and the flights of musical fantasy (one brilliant sequence is an entire Busby Berkeley-esque musical number—customarily cut in this adaptation—that dances inside the men’s prison cells). The way this film toggles between those two extreme realms is at times its greatest achievement, and also its greatest challenge: the tonal shifts ask for trust from the audience, to accept the transitions between, and more than once the film’s grasp seems to weaken.

The role of Molina is the emotional anchor of this film; and Tonatiuh gives him a performance of considerable nuance and sensitivity. He manages to bring real depth to the role without slipping into caricature, even in the more menacing world of the prison or the throbbing fantasies of glamorous movies; his Molina is full of longing, and of contradiction. More than one critic has said this is “Tonatiuh’s movie”.

Diego Luna as Valentín brings the necessary balance to the equation: a counterweight that prevents the film from slipping into pure sentimentality or cloying musical stylization. His character arc is convincingly tread: from suspicion and resistance, to tolerance, to the beginnings of a deeper feeling, perhaps love. Valentín is like a human frame for the story, and Luna’s physical presence and presence incarnate embodies the tension between the political and personal, action and feeling.

And then there’s Jennifer Lopez, in a key, ethereal dual role of Ingrid/“Spider Woman.” Her role is all-star wattage, glamor, and also a rather athletic commitment, both physically and vocally. In the fantasy sequences her presence is the key element: she is radiant, seductive, sometimes mysterious, all the hallmarks of the perfect screen goddess. Ingrid is the focus of Molina’s admiration and fantasies. Some critics have complained that Lopez’s singing lacks emotional depth or resonance, by contrast to the power around her, and in comparison, to other stage musicals. This is a fair criticism; she seems to be mimicking the feel of a big studio musical in the 1940s-1960s without the accompanying depth and control. Still, she is magnetic; and in the role of “Spider Woman” more than Ingrid, when she leans fully into the character at the end of the film, Lopez brings the heartbreak and longing that the material requires.

I left Kiss of the Spider Woman moved, stirred and frustrated. Frustrated not because it is a failure but because it reaches so high that the seams show. Audacious, it is a film that reminds you why we still go to the movies: to dream ourselves elsewhere, to face the tangled mess of desire, to see how fantasy and reality collide.

This is not a great film, but it is no shrinking violet. In its best moments, the ghosts of past musicals haunt the present, and Jennifer Lopez dares herself to inhabit the light while the shadows crowd in. The film may not always succeed, but it deserves a salute for trying. --The Hollywoodland Revue

Final grade: 3.0 / 4.0