‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ is the Most Underrated Film of the Year

Last week, I wrote about why I thought Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another was the most overrated film of the year. In the interest of balancing negativity with positivity during the holiday season, however, this week I’d like to shine a light on a film that I believe is the most underrated of the year, at least as far as box-office returns are concerned: Kiss of the Spider Woman.

The film is writer/director Bill Condon’s adaptation of the 1993 musical by John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Terrence McNally, which was itself an adaptation of a 1976 novel by Argentine writer Manuel Puig. Maybe it never had much of a chance to succeed. Despite running for a few years on Broadway, the musical is generally considered a second-tier effort from the duo that most famously created Cabaret. And the film’s headlining star, Jennifer Lopez, doesn’t have the same cultural cachet she commanded back in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Though it flopped in theaters back in October, now that it’s available to stream at home, perhaps the film can be fully appreciated for the triumph that it is.

Kiss of the Spider Woman ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Bill Condon
Written by: Bill Condon
Starring: Diego Luna, Tonatiuh, Jennifer Lopez
Running time: 129 mins

One of the ways in which Kiss of the Spider Woman is most striking is as a work of adaptation. When Brazilian director Hector Babenco first adapted Puig’s structurally complex novel in his non-musical 1985 film, he cut its six films-within-a-book down to about three and used different visual styles to clearly delineate the brutal realities of life in an Argentine prison during the Dirty War and prisoner Luis Molina’s cherished cinematic fantasies. Kander and Ebb added songs while distilling the narrative’s fantastical side even further, down to just one film-within-a-show. Instead of sticking close to the musical, however, Condon cut all the prison-set musical numbers while retaining the film-within-a-show songs.

By doing so, Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman recalls less previous adaptations of the Puig novel than Pennies from Heaven, both the 1978 BBC miniseries starring Bob Hoskins and the 1981 MGM movie musical starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. In both versions, British writer Dennis Potter depicted working-class characters in the 1930s finding in classic songs of the decade—lip-synced onscreen while the original recordings play on the soundtrack—deliverances from the drudgeries of their everyday lives. This new Kiss of the Spider Woman may substitute ’30s songs with a fake Technicolor movie musical from the 1940s, but it shares with Pennies from Heaven a view of popular art as a vessel for escapist wish fulfillment.

What distinguishes Kiss of the Spider Woman from Pennies from Heaven is its perspectives on both political engagement and queerness. Politically, the two main male prisoner characters of Kiss, Valentín Arregui (Diego Luna) and Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), are polar opposites: the former a committed-to-a-fault revolutionary, the latter evincing only a commitment to avoiding politics altogether. But as Luis—who we eventually discover the prison’s warden (Bruno Bichir) has tapped to spy on Valentín in order to gather information about a possible revolutionary attack—gradually learns, he can’t run away from political engagement forever, especially as he becomes more enamored with Valentín. As is often the case in Hollywood fantasy, love ends up being the great social equalizer.

Then there’s the fact that Luis is gay and in prison for “public indecency.” Representation-wise, Condon’s film has a leg up on Babenco’s in casting a genuine queer Latino actor in the part instead of straight WASP William Hurt (who won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance). Though their costars are bigger names, Tonatiuh—who had mostly been known for TV appearances before this—is the real star of the picture. The childlike enthusiasm they exude as Luis recounts his favorite film starring his favorite screen actress, Ingrid Luna (Lopez), is infectious, while his yearning to fully realize his inner feminine identity is heartbreaking. Here’s hoping they’ll continue to make a mark on the big screen in the future.

But few allowances need to be made for Tonatiuh’s costars. Luna may not exude quite the same firm machismo that Raul Julia did in the 1985 film, but he nevertheless charts Valentín’s gradual acceptance of a more nuanced brand of male behavior with sensitivity. And as long as you don’t expect Lopez to match Chita Rivera—the stage legend who played Ingrid Luna on Broadway—in vocal style and force of personality, she still brings enough wattage to the role of an old-school Hollywood movie star to remind us why she was considered a big deal back in the day.

And what a pleasure it is to see musical numbers that evince actual attention to blocking, color, and texture. This shouldn’t be a surprise, though, since Condon has plenty of experience with movie musicals, having directed Dreamgirls (2009) and the live-action Beauty and the Beast remake (2017), and written and/or cowritten Chicago (2002) and The Greatest Showman (2017). Condon’s affection for the genre is evident in the way cinematographer Tobias Schliessler’s camera glides during dance numbers and the colors in Scott Chambliss’s production design pop during the movie-within-a-movie sequences. Compare the imagery in Kiss of the Spider Woman to Hollywood’s other big movie musical this year, Wicked: For Good, and it’s striking how much more drab and lifeless the latter looks.

Wicked: For Good also shares a thematic similarity with Kiss of the Spider Woman that highlights its inferiority. At the climax of Part One, the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum) is revealed to be conspiring with Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) to oppress the city’s animal population. Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) spends For Good trying to expose the truth, while Glinda (Ariana Grande), more interested in being well liked, initially overlooks these injustices. Her bubble becomes an escape hatch from sociopolitical reality, much as Hollywood fantasy is for Luis in Kiss of the Spider Woman under Argentina’s fascistic military junta.

Ultimately, though, Glinda—like Luis—is forced to confront reality, but unlike Luis she is let off the hook for her former naïveté [mild spoiler alert for both films]. At the climax of Wicked: For Good, Elphaba sacrifices herself to the belief that the public must believe in evil in order to accept good, allowing Glinda to live on as the Good Witch of the North. By contrast, after finally joining the revolutionary effort, Luis is shot to death by one of Valentín’s colleagues after inadvertently leading police to them. Only in near-death musical fantasy does he receive the heroic sendoff he deserves.

Not only does Kiss of the Spider Woman surpass both Wicked films in visual spectacle, it demonstrates an intelligence and maturity that puts their simplistic political allegory to shame.