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To play the notorious Cape Fear villain Max Cady—rapist, ex-convict, autodidact, stalker, force of nature—an actor must exude equal measures violence and cunning. Fear of Cady, for the Bowden family, who find themselves in his crosshairs in every filmed adaptation of John MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners, is the terror of the rule-abiding. What would you do if a determined criminal were smart enough to work the system against you, charming enough to fool just enough people that you’ll end up alone on a houseboat in a storm, defending your family with only a rock as a weapon? In every Cape Fear, casting for the Bowden family—wealthy, soft, accustomed to security and success—barely matters. For the tension to feel tight, you need a great actor for your Cady.
The executive producers of Apple TV’s new miniseries, which drops its first two episodes on Friday, clearly knew their Cadys. (In fact, one of these producers was Martin Scorsese, who directed the hit 1991 film adaptation.) Robert Mitchum’s 1962 Max Cady was evil and charming, brusque to women and cocky to the end. (Mitchum, strip-searched by the police and wearing only boxer shorts and a panama hat, is quite the sight to see.) Robert De Niro’s 1991 Cady transformed his seething malevolence into sleazy patter long enough to seduce the Bowdens’ daughter, played by the much younger Juliette Lewis. Sideshow Bob (Kelsey Grammer), who played a spoof of the villain in The Simpsons’ landmark 1993 episode “Cape Feare,” was one of the more erudite Cadys, but not by much. De Niro’s Cady, after all, could talk his way out of a hole in the ground, ranting impressively while quoting philosophy: “ ‘I am like God and God like me! I am as large as God! He is as small as I! He cannot above me or I beneath him be!’ Silesius, 17th century!”
De Niro’s Oscar-nominated turn as the demented, ferally intelligent ex-con is a tough one to improve upon, and Javier Bardem, cast to play Cady in Apple’s series created by Nick Antosca, has to do something even more challenging: stretch out the suspense and terror over 10 hours of television, doling out menace and charm in equal measures, keeping us on the hook, much like the sleep-deprived Bowden family, never sure where he’ll come from next. Bardem is game: His Cady, an ex-restaurateur and Spanish immigrant to America with a floridly gothic childhood and adolescence, has that mix of brutal and cultured that certain women will do anything for—including one who, in Episode 1, takes the rap for a murder so Cady can get out of jail. Bardem, at 57, is a decade older than the other actors who played Cady, and this slight grizzling makes him look even more like a gentleman—until he takes off his shirt, and you see his tattoos.
Like every adapter of The Executioners, Antosca has updated the Bowdens to suit the times. The book and the first movie are all about the patriarch, a classic Southern lawyer in the Atticus Finch mold—in fact, the 1962 film’s Sam Bowden was played by Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar for his Finch in the adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird that premiered very same year. Bowden’s a pillar of the community, with an adoring wife and daughter, who must marshal the darker forces of his nature to face off against the brutish Cady. Scorsese’s adaptation innovated in making the Bowdens an unhappy family—the father’s having an emotional affair with a colleague, the daughter is on probation at school for smoking weed—which gives Cady openings to worm his way in. Now, in this new series, we have not one lawyer to contend with, but a married couple of them, Anna and Tom Bowden, played as the perfect (as Anna’s estranged father calls them) “country club liberals” by the WASP-ish Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson. They helm the kind of genteel TV family whose fridge contains Olipop and whose kids are both well provided for and secretly miserable.
During Cady’s murder trial 17 years prior, Anna and Tom, once law school buddies, reconnected and began an affair—a dicey thing, given they were Cady’s defense lawyer and prosecutor, respectively. Now, Anna works for an Innocence Project–style nonprofit, fighting to get wrongfully convicted prisoners off death row. The Bowdens live in an absolutely incredible Savannah house, walls painted with bespoke nature murals evoking the Federal period. There’s a backyard pool and an unfinished part of the house draped with plastic (“We’re between contractors,” Anna says) that’s a ripe metaphor for this family’s unexamined issues, as well as a great place for teens to get up to mischief. The Bowden kids, perfectionist daughter Natalie (Lily Collias) and withdrawn son Zack (Joe Anders), are unhappy in very modern ways, the glass sister doing endless college apps and the maybe-mentally-ill brother playing video games all day. Zack was canceled at his school for sharing nude pics of a girlfriend in a group chat, and the show proposes that this social death sentence has soured him, just as 17 years in jail drove Max Cady mad.
This miniseries throws many 1991 Cape Fear references into the pot, including using the incredibly tense and memorable four-note theme, written by Elmer Bernstein, and the trick of swapping to X-ray-style imagery to emphasize particular moments of foreboding. There are fireworks in the sky; a bad guy sticks their thumb, maybe sexually, maybe threateningly, into someone’s mouth; Max Cady does inverted situps; the iconic “staring eyes” image hangs on the wall of a bedroom in the Bowdens’ house; an antagonist smokes and laughs hysterically in a movie theater, provoking families around them.*
But evoking Scorsese’s adaptation is a dangerous game. That Cape Fear had a perfect sense of what makes for a disturbing detail (De Niro’s unforgettable pronunciation of the word “sexuality” in his phone call with Lewis’ Danielle) or suspenseful visual. The famous scene where the Bowdens set up their daughter’s teddy bear in a chair with a wire that will tug at its neck if Cady stumbles on a backyard tripwire is economical in meaning and storytelling, and the sight of Cady clinging onto the bottom of the family car (a shot invented for this adaptation) is indelible. In two hours and eight minutes, that movie made you feel trapped like no other.
With 10 hourlong episodes of miniseries to fill (eight of which critics were given to screen ahead of the premiere) there is simply time for too much to happen in Apple’s adaptation, and it can’t all be gold. A thriller’s tension develops via reversals: You begin to trust Cady, then you see him get violent with a fringe character, and get skittish again. You calm down a bit, and then something inexplicable happens (dead skunks in the pool! The family’s iced tea is spiked with acid!) and the tension builds again, until it’s explained. There are only so many times you can see Cady ingratiate, then lash out, then ingratiate again.
Worst of all, this new Max Cady has all kinds of new backstory, and the show inserts you into his subjectivity far too often. There are multiple Cady family members on screen. There’s a conflict with an older family member in which Cady, supposed to be an implacable force, actually gets upset. Something happened to Cady in jail that may or may not be responsible for his visions, fits, and spates of violence. And there is a religious plotline that brings things into the realm of the supernatural. De Niro’s Cady was raised by Pentecostals, and there’s a vague sense that he takes his charisma from that experience. (Remember how he sinks below the water of the river at the end of the movie, speaking in tongues?) In the miniseries, the religion that Bardem’s Cady starts practicing in jail turns into a tool for his revenge. You risk a lot when you do this much explaining of a man who should feel like a terrifying act of God. Stare too long, and he starts to look less like a divine force, and more like a regular guy.
This paragraph originally contained a spoiler for a later episode. That spoiler has since been removed.
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