Spider-Man<br></br>Betty Fisher and Other Stories

Now that's what I call a comic turn

Given its record-breaking performance at the US box-office, the long-awaited Spider-Man looks old-fashioned, slightly cheap and decidedly mundane – certainly when compared to Attack of the Clones, with its galactic intrigue, warring multitudes and interplanetary Mills & Boon romance. Sam Raimi's Marvel Comics adaptation has one man swinging between buildings, a villain in a green metal mask, and two teenagers snogging in a rainy alley. Which is precisely why Raimi's modest effort (modest as multi-million dollar blockbusters go) sweeps the floor with George Lucas.

I've heard some people complain that the effects in Spider-Man are shoddy, but these people have had their retinas singed by too much Industrial Light and Magic. True, the shots of the all-digital Spider-Man swinging from roof to roof through Manhattan don't look as seamlessly realistic as we're used to, but that's the point: this comic-strip adaptation actually cultivates a comic-strip look. Spider-Man doesn't look human so much as animated: you can't quite believe that this red-and-blue streak of elasticity is really Tobey Maguire, and sure enough it isn't. The leap of credibility is as important as the leaps between buildings.

Sam Raimi's career, from The Evil Dead on, has been a restless, sometimes slapdash joyride through genres, done with movie-buff eagerness, and Spider-Man benefits from a fan's respect and relish for the original early-Sixties comic. Unusually among such films, this one doesn't over-stylise or ironise the source material: there's neither the hyper-sheened grandiosity of X-Men, or the cheap camp of Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever. Without throwing in retro references, Raimi creates a world that belongs to the early Sixties as much as the present: it's not glaringly anachronistic, but the high school where Peter Parker (Maguire) has such a rough time seems not to count a single skateboarder or Slipknot fan among its students. Beyond a few nods to the present – a Macy Gray cameo, a WWF-style wrestling match – the film is set in a timeless, oddly scaled-down America. The home of Peter's Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) and Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) looks too small on the inside, a visual correlative for the childhood Peter is about to slough off. When he finally gets a coy interlude with Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), literally the girl next door, it's over the garbage in his back yard. With such frill-free, to-the-point domesticity, we could almost be in one of Disney's live action movies of the mid-Sixties.

This guilelessness actually gives the film more of an emotional thrust than any comic-strip adaptation I can think of. Instead of the distant, nocturnal angst of Tim Burton's Batman, Spider-Man's agony mixes superhero rage and guilt with the everyday suffering of the gawky teenager secretly yearning for the school sex symbol. Bitten by a genetically-engineered spider, Spider-Man revels not only in his new arachnid powers but also in the fact that he can stop wearing glasses. His budding, awkward romance with Mary Jane is the film's box-office trump card: Maguire, with his doe eyes, pasty cheeks and whiny delivery, and the moon-faced, startlingly wholesome Dunst are a cuter, far more approachable couple than Buffy and any of her hunky vampiric swains. Their romance gives the unusually low-key climax its ring of urgency: never mind saving the world, Spider-Man simply has to choose between rescuing Mary Jane and a cable-car full of kids. The love triangle is completed by Peter's even more tormented pal Harry (James Dean lookalike James Franco), whose sulks are no doubt being honed for the sequel.

It's a shame that Raimi didn't go more for the scratchy, Germanic look of the strip's original artist Steve Ditko: he only gets truly cartoonish at the offices of press baron J Jonah Jameson (a fast-talking, cigar-chewing, scene-stealing JK Simmons), where staff are apparently under contractual obligation to wear their hair weird. When Raimi does lay on the gothic, he does it with style. The evil Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) is genuinely scary at times. There's a daring moment when he and Spider-Man meet, and we see an encounter between two masks, no movement or expression visible through them: it's like a sudden detour into Balinese theatre. Dafoe gleefully takes the money and runs, riffing off Jack Nicholson's facial tics from The Shining, and cackling like the Wicked Witch of the West. Spider-Man is not that special, but these days, and in this genre, that's special in itself.

The week's other star web-spinner is Ruth Rendell, whose novel The Tree of Hands is the basis for Claude Miller's Betty Fisher and Other Stories. This acidic French thriller begins with novelist Betty (Sandrine Kiberlain) reunited with her mother (Nicole Garcia), who is deeply disturbed, shockingly selfish and a motormouth to boot. We expect something like The Piano Teacher's study of a damaged family relationship, until events take a turn at once tragic and farcical. The story spreads out to take in a trashy banlieue waitress (Mathilde Seigner), her long-suffering African boyfriend (Luck Mervil) and a feckless down-at-heel gigolo (Edouard Baer, pricelessly creepy).

Miller balances the mood between psychodrama and dark social comedy until an outrageous pile-up of coincidences concludes matters with ironic neatness, the right people getting their come-uppances for the wrong reasons. The upshot might seem punitively snobbish – a working-class single mother is the most rebarbative character – but in the context of a French thriller, where the bourgeois-baiting Claude Chabrol template still holds (Chabrol too has adapted Rendell), this itself is a kind of stereotype-busting. The performances are pretty much flawless – Nicole Garcia is memorably monstrous, and Kiberlain, with her blank, bleached-out urchin features, is a magnetic presence that's more like an absence.

j.romney@independent.co.uk