It must be one of the most reoccurring frights among criminal lawyers, the possibility of a former client, who feels he’s been victimized, coming back to enact a vengeance. This nightmare becomes a reality for Nick Nolte’s character, Sam Bowden, in Martin Scorsese’s remake of the classic noir thriller, Cape Fear. Bowden is threatened by a man from long ago – a rapist fresh out of a 14-year sentence eager to get revenge for what he believes (rightly so) was a weak defense.
Scorsese has approached this film much differently than the original. In the original film, Gregory Peck’s Bowden was a good man trying to defend his family, but in this version, Bowden is flawed, and no character is left guiltless. That is the Scorsese trademark.
Bowden leads a troubled family. He and his wife (Jessica Lange) have been to counseling on multiple occasions, and now he seems to be on the brink of an affair. They live in a house surrounded by brick walls and towering trees, and yet their daughter Danielle (Juliette Lewis) is still relentlessly uncomfortable. She hates it when her parents fight and immediately retreats to her room to watch MTV and pacify her mind. It’s too apparent that this family had troubles long before Max Cady comes along.
Max Cady is played by Robert De Niro. Covered by tattoos with various bible warnings, Cady is a weight-lifting, strong headed psychopath who learned law in prison by reading books. He’ll eventually offer to “teach” Bowden the law himself, but in the meantime, he becomes an expert on the line between legal and illegal – a skill that he will use, and use often. When he’s released from prison early on in the film, a monstrous thunderstorm follows close behind.
Soon after, Bowden starts noticing the ominous figure everywhere he goes. First it’s at the movies, or at a restaurant, but it quickly evolves. The first time Mrs. Bowden sees Cady, he’s sitting at the top of the family’s brick wall, illuminated only by the nearby fireworks. He is watching them.
Cady’s book-learning has made him clever, and thus, an even greater threat – he just manages to stay on the right side of the law – technically (perhaps better phrased as legally), he isn’t trespassing. It’s as if the game Cady has orchestrated lies on the same line as psychological warfare, twisting and turning Bowden’s wires until they snap.
Sam goes to the police, to a fellow lawyer, and to a private investigator, but there is nothing they can do. He is baffled when he hears that it is he who is doing the illegal (but right) thing. A cop advises the lawyer to put the situation in his own hands, but Bowden eventually persuades the investigator Kersek (Joe Don Baker) to help him. And in this process, it becomes more and more obvious that no one is entirely chaste. Scorsese firmly attaches his film to that idea.
As the horrifying cabaret plays out, the Bowden family continues to fall apart. Sam is unable to handle this kind of a situation, and he quickly loses the respect of his wife and daughter. The wife, Leigh, grows increasingly impatient with her husband’s actions inside the house and suspicious of the ones outside the house. And his daughter, an entirely resistant teenager, wants nothing to do with her father – she is tired of having to hide inside her house from a bad guy she doesn’t take seriously. In fact, after a disturbing dialogue between her and Cady, who is posing as her drama teacher, she grows an affection towards the psycho (or maybe just the danger he brings to Sam).
Scorsese’s version of Cady is pure evil. Bowden is not evil, but he is not a good person – he eventually agrees with Kersek that maybe somebody should go put some sense into Cady. And when Cady overtops the three hired men and their weapons, the dire complexity of the film is unveiled. Instead of giving us a tired-out version of this scene, Scorsese presents his villain as a wronged man, and his story as the wronged villain trying to pass out a punishment to a sinful hero.
Cape Fear is a well-made and entertaining film, and it establishes Scorsese’s dominance over a long-since-retired genre, but it is unable to hide its extremely high budget. With the big stars, and the vast quantity of special effects, it’d be nearly impossible to.
This was the first of two films in a contract Scorsese signed with Universal Studios (the other would be Casino in 1995), and it is too obvious that he has not been exposed to this kind of budget before. Although De Niro is at the top of his game here, for the man that made Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Wolf of Wall Street, this film is nothing special.
