So when I first learned that there would be another Cape Fear remake, I was dismissive: The first two were good. For those who don’t know, the original starred Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, circa 1962, and is a noir classic. Then Martin Scorsese remade it in 1991 with Nick Nolte and Robert DeNiro, also quite good. Why another? Now that I’m watching the Apple TV series (big change from a feature-length movie) I see what they’ve done with it and have to say . . . it works. It’s even weirder than the first two gruesome versions.
The longer format of a series apparently led to the creation of numerous minor characters and major adjustments to the main characters. The nominal star of this remake is Amy Adams as Anna Bowden. Adams does a terrific job playing the lawyer whose fishy behavior led to Max Cady’s (Javier Bardem) imprisonment for 17 years. She’s cocky but vulnerable and a tad unhinged, guilty of the sin of hubris—or as my Catholic-school nun teachers would argue, the sin of Pride, the worst of the Seven Deadlies. She’s guilty of lawyerly misconduct because she believed her client, Cady, was guilty of the murder for which he was being prosecuted—by none other than her soon-to-be lawyer husband and former prosecutor of the murder case (Tom Bowden, played by Patrick Wilson). Seventeen years later, Max Cady gets released from prison and is out for revenge.
The differences between the earlier feature-length films and this series are too numerous to list, and the main reason why it seems like its own beast, not just another paint-by-numbers remake. For one thing, in the first two films the lawyer couple upon which Max wreaked his vengeance had one teenage daughter, who at some point Max comes to threaten. In the series, they have a teenage daughter, Natalie (played by Lily Collias, who looks more like her early 20s) and a teenage son Zach (played by Joe Anders, who does a good job of being moody). At first Zach is the one in trouble, presumably targeted by Max Cady as part of his revenge plot when he comes home missing a toe. It’s updated to include the role of technology in this Revenge Tale: Zach is wooed online by the sexy Nevaeh Valentine (played by Malia Pyles), Max’s mysterious and possibly homicidal daughter. Zach is a gamer who has shared nudes of his ex-girlfriend with other high-school classmates and is in purgatory for that sin.
But the real action crackles between Amy Adams and Javier Bardem. Bardem plays the role like a charming devil. He’s not as typecast as the first two films, not simply The Bad Guy. In this version he’s been wronged and may well be as murderous and evil as the lawyers think he is, but he’s also clever enough to milk the circumstances to appear the victim. Meanwhile Adams seems to react badly to one outrage after another, and is busy digging her own grave. It’s up to episode 6 by now, and one of its surprising charms is that you can’t really guess what happens next. Maybe Max gets his revenge and maybe he doesn’t. More likely the revenge he effects is more complex and nuanced than the violent end of both earlier films. Not that I don’t expect a violent ending, but it’s not the only option for the varied storylines. I’m enjoying it—even though, at the outset, I didn’t even want to watch it.