Kiss of the Spider Woman is not your entry-level musical. Even its characters seem to know this: One of their first conversations after becoming cellmates involves prisoners Luis Molina (played by the actor known mononymously as Tonatiuh) and Valentín Arregui (Diego Luna) debating the genre’s different merits.
It’s perhaps an odd conversation for them to have, given it’s taking place during Argentina’s “Dirty War” of the 1980s. Molina’s crime of having a homosexual liaison and Arregui’s as being a revolutionary organizer mean they’re both facing long stints in an institution whose guards regularly taunt, torture and even poison inmates for information.
But their dialogue soon takes a lighter turn. Instead of talking about the dripping dankness of political repression and unjust imprisonment, they get to chatting about Kiss of the Spider Woman, the fictional movie-in-a-movie that Molina happens to adore. This is partly because Molina has resolved not to hear about depressing things, even despite a yearning to get Arregui to reveal a few important elements about his shadowy past — because getting closer to the black box of a man could prove to be his ticket out.
Just how to go about that without tipping Arregui off? Molina moves carefully, if perhaps a bit operatically. He can recite Kiss of a Spider Woman from memory, he tells Arregui, promising to take them both away into lush, technicolour musical numbers led by the beautiful actress Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez). And as they weave through a story about forbidden love, betrayal and fate, maybe there will be enough parallels for the two to get to chatting about something Molina desperately needs to know.
There’s only one problem. Arregui hates musicals.
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“And I pity you,” Molina quips.
“I’m sorry to break the news,” Arregui shoots back. “But nobody sings in real life.”
An accurate observation, if also completely irrelevant to the plot at hand. But it does reflect the most common complaint people in real life levy against the medium that once fully dominated Hollywood: The concept of ostensibly real people breaking out into choreographed song and dance isn’t, strictly speaking, realistic.
Ignoring the fact that Lord of the Rings’s orc battles or Everything Everywhere All at Once’s time travelling shenanigans aren’t exactly realistic either, the suspension of disbelief needed to accept Ben Platt suddenly launching into showtunes does seem to be too high a bar for seemingly the same group of people who say they like all music — except country.
Strengths and weaknesses
That Kiss of the Spider Woman doesn’t really try to get past this is both its greatest strength and most glaring weakness. Its strength is in its unapologetic love for musicals and classic Hollywood: a core element of this story since its original stage production and especially following the 1985 film by director Héctor Babenco.
When we enter the musical world of Molina’s mind, we see all the brightly lit, beautifully surreal staging of everything from Oliver! to The Broadway Melody. And as they slip into the dreamlike film-in-a-film narrative, we’re treated to the impressive musical talents of both Arregui and —especially — Molina.
Even Lopez is used well here: The one-dimensional character she plays in the intentionally facile musical lends itself to her strengths. A seemingly ageless bombshell with considerable dance skills even still, she takes up just enough screentime to enchant, without ever actually giving us anything too weighty to examine.
Instead, that burden falls on Molina, who more than steps up to the plate. Tonatiuh, who is themself nonbinary, plays the gender non-conforming Molina with a heartbreaking commitment, exploring both the character’s masculine and feminine identities in monologues about long lost lovers, and in the face of guards who spit slurs and laugh.
Their performance has already been deemed revelatory by the New York Times, and it’s nowhere near premature to guess at possible Oscar nominations — matching William Hurt’s 1986 win for portraying the same character.
Realism and accessibility
But all that is in the face of the inaccessible, almost painfully stage-theatrical aspects of a truly unapologetic musical film. While Babenco honed a commitment to realism from his early docudrama classic Pixote, this Spider Woman is heightened to a fault.
Director Bill Condon eschews the skillful self-awareness he wrote into Chicago, in which the musical numbers helped contrast the fetishization of true crime with the world of show business. He also forgoes learning from something like the Canadian musical The Drowsy Chaperone, which also used the conceit of a narrator explaining a musical that the audience then watched.
Instead using the lyrics to lampshade complaints about musicals (a technique anyone who’s listened to Bride’s Lament: Monkey on a Pedestal understands well) the songs and staging of Kiss of the Spider Woman are just as stilted and occasionally stale as you might expect a real golden-age musical made today may be. And worse, they’re never all that catchy.
And the larger-than-life affectations and overly dramatic line readings that make up Tonatiuh’s performance, stunning as it may be, do sound more like a stage actor playing to the back of the house than a film actor subtly emoting to the lens. The result is a bit too much of the sickly sweet, at least for those with a limited tolerance for the overly sentimental.
This isn’t to say Kiss of the Spider Woman is in any way a happy-go-lucky film. Far from it: The almost crushingly maudlin prison sections do all they can to fade any grins the preceding musical numbers may have inspired. But they do so with more of what Spider Woman is full of: melodrama unconcerned with the nit-picky concern of “realism.”
Which is more than fine. There is no real reason to solely pursue realism when making art. But there’s enough stigma around musical movies that studios have done everything from framing Dear Evan Hansen with a shaky cam or stupidly employing the useless gimmick of film actors singing live to force some realism. And that does mean one thing: Kiss of the Spider Woman is not your entry-level movie musical.
