The music is meh, but "Kiss of the Spider Woman" still succeeds

Bill Condon's Kiss of the Spider Woman challenges a belief I've long held: that in order for a musical to succeed, it must have memorable musical numbers.

The tunes in Spider Woman aren't terrible so much as they are wallpaper, meh, pleasant enough in the moment yet evaporated from the mind as soon as the polite, obligatory audience applause marks the transition to the next scene. The Broadway production this film is based on won a handful of Tonys in 1993, including best musical — though it's doubtful many would argue that it's among the best efforts of John Kander and Fred Ebb, the songwriting team behind Cabaret and Chicago.

For these reasons alone, this movie shouldn’t work — yet it mostly does anyhow, triumphing over those artistic limitations via vivid characterizations and a pulsating sense of urgency. Spider Woman has shapeshifted through various adaptations over the years, originating with Argentine writer Manuel Puig’s experimental 1976 novel about the relationship between a disaffected gay man and a political prisoner sharing a cell in an Argentine prison. Condon picks up on the inherent subversiveness of Puig’s work, funnels it through that Broadway production, and molds it assuredly for contemporary sensibilities.

The result is an impressive balancing act between the exuberant Technicolor fantasy of classic movie musicals and the weary reality of Argentina’s oppressive military dictatorship during the late 20^th century, and with an evolved perspective on gender and sexuality. On paper, it probably sounds like an incongruent didactic drag; in practice it’s a poignant and immersive contribution to the novel’s legacy.

It’s 1983, several years into the devastating period known as the “Dirty War,” and two people share a prison cell: Molina (Tonatiuh), a queer window dresser serving an eight-year sentence for “public indecency” with a man, and Valentín (Diego Luna), a Marxist revolutionary being tortured by the guards for information on his comrades. Their dynamic is unsurprisingly prickly at first — the theatrical Molina is proudly apolitical and overly chatty about popular culture, while the stern and irritable Valentín is closely studying a Lenin biography when we first meet him.

To pass the time and distract from the doldrums of their present conditions, Molina recounts aloud from memory the plot of his favorite movie Kiss of the Spider Woman, starring his idol, the glamorous Latin dancing and singing star Ingrid Luna (a luminous Jennifer Lopez). Molina envisions himself and Valentín as secondary characters in the film – her devoted and closeted assistant and her love interest, respectively.

Spider Woman’s not-so-secret weapon is Tonatiuh, who’s popped up in smaller roles (including as Marcos in the dearly departed series Vida) and officially breaks out here in a multifaceted performance. Molina could be a landmine of flamboyant, diva-worshipping stereotypes, and those details show up here, to be sure. But the script musses up those surface-level tensions, particularly as we learn early on that Molina, hoping to negotiate an early release, is reluctantly working undercover with the prison warden to try and coax intel from Valentín. Tonatiuh, who uses he/they pronouns, is more than game to find and play with the shades of a far more humanized character — catty, nerdy, defensively self-deprecating, highly opinionated, but above all, compassionate.

Crucially, Condon envisions a stark divide between the central story of Molina and Valentín's relationship within the prison walls — the film’s emotional core — and the movie-within-the-movie; almost every song from the stage version taking place in the “real” world has been cut. (The exception is “Dear One/Querida,” a brief but evocative interlude sung in Spanish by two prisoners.) It’s obviously not a new conceit — for one, Condon’s screenplay for best picture-winner Chicago takes a similar approach in staging the numbers at least in part on black box stages, underlining the theatrical nature in opposition to reality. But it’s an especially wise choice when the text is rich and nuanced yet the music you’re working with is slight.

Lopez fronts most of the songs, and well … she tries her best. Her claim for “triple-threat” status has always carried with it an asterisk in acknowledgement of her glaring vocal limitations, despite having multiple number one hits and a handful of genuinely indelible bangers. But the choreography, by Sergio Trujillo, Christopher Scott, and Brandon Bieber, and the outfits, by Colleen Atwood and Christine Cantella, are fierce.

Separating church and state, as it were, allows the scenes carrying the dramatic weight to soar on the strength of the dialogue and relationships, and for the songs to serve the same purpose for the audience as they do for Molina: pure, mindless escapism. As Molina matter-of-factly sums up Kiss of the Spider Woman: “It’s not Citizen Kane. Call it kitsch, call it camp. I don’t care – I love it.” Those numbers are indeed a pastiche of kitsch, camp, and plenty of references cinephiles will appreciate — including “Get Happy” in Summer Stock, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and other Kander and Ebb productions, especially Chicago.

But what I keep coming back to are those scenes in that claustrophobic prison cell where two very different characters, with little to do besides tell each other stories and reveal themselves to one another, come to bring out the best in each other. Nothing about Valentín and Molina’s journey together feels forced or false, and even though it’s set in the past – while oozing nostalgia for an even more distant past – it’s in direct conversation with the chaotic and dystopian reality of the now. The film asks and at least tries to answer some of the questions vulnerable people are wondering themselves about what it means to “resist” and what role art and joy can play, if any, when their existence is threatened. And by the last frame, Spider Woman’s seduction is complete.