To love Dakota Johnson is to understand that Dakota Johnson probably hates you for it a little bit.
When she was in 50 Shades of Grey, all anyone could talk about was Johnson’s sheer lack of chemistry with (and perhaps even strong distaste for) handsome costar Jamie Dornan. For a movie that’s supposed to be all about mutual appeal, the press tour lacked even the faintest suggestion of it. If you found their onscreen relationship at all convincing, Johnson would probably politely say, “I love that for you!”
Even bigger than her open embrace of the 50 Shades stiffness came from Johnson’s run-in with Ellen DeGeneres. The actor confronted the terminally amicable talk show host, who had until that point held the mantle of the nicest person on TV, calling Ellen out as a liar. Technically, it was DeGeneres who snubbed Johnson’s birthday party invite, Johnson explained, not a lack of invitation. DeGeneres’s saccharine empire crumbled soon after and Johnson was cheered as the people’s princess. “It will haunt me,” she said to L’Officiel this month of the interaction, telling the publication that journalists as a whole do not understand sarcasm.
Johnson’s unrelenting dryness is her hallmark, like when she famously claimed to love limes. “I love them so much. They’re great, and I love them so much, and I like to present them like this in my house,” she said, pointing to a pyramid of limes during her house tour with Architectural Digest. There was an uncanniness to her delivery; something was endearingly off. Later, on The Tonight Show, she revealed that she was actually allergic to limes, and they were planted by a set designer. “It was hard to just ignore them, so I just lied,” she said, of the citric flourish. Later, she doubled down, saying “I don’t really care about limes.”
As a media personality, Johnson is organic and truly unrehearsed. But when she does or says something fascinating or amusing, she seems to think you’re the weird one for liking it. Being charming is just normal for her. Being charmed by her normality is, to her, a little silly.
Putting her front and center in Madame Web, a Spider-Man-based superhero movie, is an inspired but counterintuitive choice. Superheroes are built on winning an audience over. People root for superheroes. Dakota Johnson doesn’t seem to ever want you rooting for her. And if Dakota Johnson doesn’t really care about limes, why would Johnson care about a tertiary Spider-Man character?
That’s the magic of the gloriously clumsy, terrifically absurd Madame Web, a movie that Johnson herself said was maybe, probably, going to be kind of terrible. And if Dakota Johnson says something is kind of terrible, don’t you kind of want to see what she means? After all, it could just be an unenthusiastic illusion, like the limes.
Don’t take Madame Web too seriously. Don’t take any superhero movie too seriously.
In Madame Web, Johnson plays Cassandra “Cassie” Webb, the Spider-Lady at the heart of the movie. Even though her arthropod-esque, prophetic name kinda gives everything away, Cassie thinks she’s just a New York City EMT. What Cassie doesn’t fully know is that she has powers thanks to her late mother, an intrepid amateur arachnologist.
Constance Webb (Kerry Bishé) believed spiders could cure disease, specifically that there was a special spider in the Peruvian Amazon whose venom and cell structure could yield special benefits. Even seven months pregnant with Cassie, she considered that spider worth risking a jungle adventure. To communicate this potential to the audience, Constance and other characters just say “peptides” over and over, waving away technicalities, science, and logic.
Cassie Webb is an EMT who hates people! Representation matters! Jessica Kourkounis/Sony Pictures
If you take umbrage with that kind of storytelling, I have no idea what to tell you. That’s your own problem. This is no bait and switch. This is a movie with Dakota Johnson playing an EMT who is also a psychic Spider-Lady. This isn’t an exegesis on the themes of Foucault, but you should already know that.
The writing duo behind Madame Web also gave us Morbius, a Spider-verse story about an antihero vampire in STEM, and the doomed 2017 Power Rangers reboot. Their continued Hollywood employment despite consistent clunkerdom is a feat. Like those “movies,” Madame Web isn’t so much a film but rather a 116-minute collection of 13-second intervals where characters tell you how they feel (usually one of sad, happy, or scared), who they are (their names, what they’re good at, and where they live), or exactly what they’re gonna do next (going to a diner, going to Peru, going to kill some people in Peru).
Unfortunately for Constance, she’s not the only one who’s on the hunt — her bodyguard Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) has been searching for the rare arachnids too, which is why he sadly needs to shoot her. Ezekiel believes in the myths of Arañas, people with spider-granted super strength who can zip through jungle trees. As Constance bleeds out in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon, she discovers that the Arañas are real. They compel their magical medical spider to sink its fangs into her, which doesn’t save Constance’s life but does save Cassie’s. It also imbues her with the power to see the future. The Arañas, thankfully, for some reason, speak English, which makes this entire kidnapping-spider-biting ritual feel less hostile, as they tell the dying Constance they’re saving her unborn baby.
Like the audience watching, Constance is encouraged to just go with it.
It’s unclear who named Cassie or how adoption works in the Peruvian Amazon. Being so far from civilization, the Arañas ostensibly had to care for this newborn orphan for some amount of time. Yet, Adult Cassie tells us she’s the product of the American foster care system and also somehow has a trunk full of her mom’s spider research, a series of notebooks that undoubtedly has the word “peptides” underlined over and over. Perhaps the Arañas’s real superpower was finding a way to get baby Cassie, a Peruvian immigrant, to the United States with her mom’s scientific research intact and dropping her right into the hands of CPS.
Raising Cassie as an Araña would surely have been an easier time for everyone involved. But like Cassie, we cannot change what’s already been decided for us. This is Madame Web, not Señora Araña!
Cassie Webb kind of sucks, and that rules
According to Spider-Man lore, a radioactive eight-legged arachnid bit Peter Parker and gave him “Spidey sense” plus enhanced agility, super strength, and wall-climbing abilities. Similarly, the itsy-bitsy that bit Miles Morales activated those gifts plus invisibility and bioelectric venom strike. In the Spider-Verse, spiders bite people and grant them the powers they share.
Going by this logic, the spider that bit Cassie’s mom could see the future and maybe, was kind of a jerk.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many memorable scenes between Johnson and costar Sydney Sweeney. A DGAF-off that I would have loved to witness. Sony Pictures
In this world, spiders have some kind of foresight that allows them to glimpse the future — but a very specific and localized peek and not, like, a profound understanding of the fullness and fabric of time. The power functions like déjà vu, as the spider would ostensibly fully live through one version of the future and snap back to 30 seconds before it all happened. Given that a spider’s life in the Peruvian Amazon is probably filled with all kinds of threats, this way of living would probably make it a little bit supernaturally cranky. This heightened anticipation also explains how the spider managed to elude humans for so long.
Like the spider that bit her mom, Adult Cassie doesn’t particularly enjoy human interaction. This might seem at odds with Cassie’s vocation as a post-9/11 first responder — the movie is set in 2003 — until you remember that Cassie helps people who are usually extremely injured and unconscious.
Cassie dodges her own captain’s baby shower with a Johnson-esque “I don’t want to get roped into that.” She’s mostly okay with only one coworker, her partner Ben Parker (Adam Scott). Yes, that name is supposed to raise all kinds of alarms, as does the fact that Ben has a pregnant sister named Mary (Emma Roberts). That sure would make him an uncle named Ben.
Johnson delivers all of Cassie’s lines — from saying “you’re welcome” to the loved ones of her patients to telling party attendees that her dead mom was probably irresponsible — with weaponized uptalk. Uptalk, some researchers say, is designed to slyly announce dominance in a submissive way; it’s an assertion disguised as a question. In Cassie’s voice, it feels like she’s asking the audience to empathize with the dolts around her.
Madame Web and her spider-teen charges. Sony Pictures
This isn’t that different from how the real Dakota Johnson, daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson and granddaughter of Tippi Hedren, speaks: fearless deadpan combined with condescending inquisitiveness to create an undertone of cool menace. Johnson is not a chameleon, and her best roles have tapped into that unreadable opacity, making use of her ability to turn others into the inconsequential lime sitting on her counter.
In Madame Web, Johnson’s delivery often feels like she’s making fun of the movie she’s in. Every line has a wink, a vague suggestion to the audience that she can’t believe she’s saying things like “The best part of the future is that it hasn’t happened yet” either. Yet her half-hearted commitment to the bit is endearing because maybe superhero movies are made to be laughed at. Extremely stupid and extremely fun are not mutually exclusive.
Instead of her power allowing her to win the lottery or at least invest in pre-iPhone Apple, Cassie has to use her power to protect three teenage girls — played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabel Merced, and Celeste O’Connor — from Ezekiel, who is back from his own trip to the Amazon. She’s extremely annoyed that her precognitive abilities have turned her into a very powerful au pair.
“Don’t do dumb stuff,” she tells the girls. Unfortunately, teenage girls aren’t easily frightened by uptalk inflection. They continue to do dumb stuff, and Cassie considers abandoning them. Cassie Webb is perhaps the most relatable superhero in the Spider-Verse.
Ezekiel has foreseen, via spider bite, that these teens will eventually become superhero Spider-Women and kill him. He’s hired a woman named Amaria (Zosia Mamet, another talented nepo baby) to hack into the NSA and track the girls, an extraneous plot device but one that allows Mamet to shine as a snarky lady computer genius in a room of screens and monitors.
Like its superhero movie brethren, one of the huge reasons Madame Web exists is to lock in IP and tease out the possibility of more superhero movies. The girls in the film will grow up to be comic book superheroes known as Spider-Woman, Spider-Girl, and also Spider-Woman (titles in comics get passed around a lot). Cassie becomes the psychic, future-manipulating powerhouse known as Madame Web. Given Marvel’s compulsion to drive superheroes into the realm of cinematic anesthesia, Sony, perhaps unintentionally, making a movie as clumsily fun as Madame Web is refreshing. I would see at least two more of these at the theater.
That’s a testament to Johnson’s innate ability to charm despite the material. Her performance feels like an inside joke that you’re lucky to be privy to. It’s as though she’s acknowledging that this whole thing — the peptides, the Arañas, the ability to read the future, this loser who wants to kill teenage girls — is all rather absurd. And that’s okay because it’s a superhero movie, but she’ll think you’re weird for liking it.
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