cape fear<\/a><\/p>\nWhy Would I Want to Hurt You?<\/p>\n
\n Season 1<\/p>\n
Episode 2\n <\/p>\n
\n Editor\u2019s Rating<\/p>\n
3 stars<\/p>\n
***\n <\/p>\n
\n Cady is just getting started in his revenge plot against the Bowdens, but we\u2019re still left wondering what his motivations are.
\n Photo: Apple TV\n <\/p>\n
The Max Cady of the two Cape Fear movies \u2014 and the John D. MacDonald novel that inspired them \u2014 is an unquestionably monstrous person, even if the 1991 Cady happened to be wronged by his defense attorney. In the 1962 film, Cady takes revenge on Gregory Peck\u2019s character for offering the eyewitness testimony that got him locked up for sexual assault. The \u201991 version has Nick Nolte\u2019s lawyer burying a piece of evidence about the victim\u2019s supposed \u201cpromiscuity\u201d because he was certain that Cady was guilty and wanted him sent away, which is not ethical behavior, of course, but which emphasizes how dangerous he felt his client to be. (To add more proof of Cady\u2019s potential for violence, the film shows him viciously assaulting the lawyer\u2019s would-be mistress as part of a psychological campaign against him.) Cady may or may not have been wronged in these films, but there\u2019s little doubt that he\u2019s done (and can do) some awful things.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s still a lot we don\u2019t know about the Max Cady of this Cape Fear, and the slow drip-drip-drip of revelations about his past is something that a ten-episode miniseries can afford to tease out a little bit. But one theme this second episode floats repeatedly is the idea that the Max Cadys of the world are not born irredeemably violent but made in a prison system that does the opposite of reforming them. We may learn later in the series that Tom and Anna Bowden, like Nolte in the \u201991 film, had a solid rationale for breaking their ethical commitment to the law and conspiring to send Cady upriver for life. For now, Cape Fear can present Cady as a diabolical threat to the Bowdens while playing coy about the fuller arc of his life. That means flashbacks ahoy!<\/p>\n
The pre-credit sequence at Tarwater prison in Savannah sets the tone so gruesomely that the artful black-and-white helps cover for how gory it would be otherwise. In an homage to the \u201991 Cape Fear, where Robert De Niro\u2019s Cady has an entire phone conversation hanging from a bar, Javier Bardem\u2019s Cady is shown swinging in the prison weight room seven years earlier. We know from the last episode that Cady has a metal plate in his head from a prison fight, and now we see how it got cracked open. Three men descend on Cady with the intent to murder him, with a fourth yet-to-be-identified older man sitting back in the corner, presumably having ordered the hit. Cady gets the upper hand, killing two of the men and badly injuring the other, but the context for the attack is tabled for now. The goal, at least for this episode, is to suggest that prison isn\u2019t just a landing spot for convicted criminals but a place where they can change dramatically for the worse.<\/p>\n
To underline the point, the episode circles back to Byron French, the convict that Anna and her firm exonerated after 14 years, just in time to impress donors at their gala benefit. Anna wanted to parade Byron around as an example of the important work they\u2019re doing on behalf of the wrongly convicted, so she waved away his mother\u2019s urgent concerns over his behavior since he returned home. Following up on the ominous image of the mother\u2019s tipped-over oxygen tank, this episode reveals that Byron and his mother are both dead in what appears to be a murder-suicide, and now Anna and Noa are left to pick up the pieces. A co-worker of theirs, introduced briefly last week as an ex-con, shares an insight with Anne that doubles as a thesis for the whole episode: \u201cPrison is a first-hand education in the different ways a man can change. I mean, it could build a man up or break him down, or turn him into something his own mom won\u2019t recognize.\u201d Byron had made that transformation.<\/p>\n
And so, possibly, had Cady. We keep coming back to the moment where Cady seems to have manipulated his mistress, Amy Brancato, into confessing to the murder of his wife and unborn son before shooting herself in the head. Given that the suicide happened 17 years deep into his prison sentence, is it possible that Cady would not have been capable of something so nasty before spending time in the clink? The episode strongly suggests that might be the case, and it\u2019ll be interesting to see how far this Cape Fear presses the issue. Is this going to be a series about the \u201ccriminal injustice\u201d and the prison system? Or is that merely one early agenda item in a series with a lot of time to fill and other things on its mind, too?<\/p>\n
For the time being, it\u2019s putting the clamps on Bardem\u2019s Max Cady, who possesses neither the sinister cool of Robert Mitchum in the \u201962 Cape Fear nor the often hilarious redneck bravado of De Niro in the \u201991 version. Bardem\u2019s casting inevitably calls to mind his signature role as Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, but his Cady is more hot-blooded, without any of Chigurh\u2019s mirthless, relentless inevitability. What\u2019s missing so far is a sense of humor that would help this series tremendously. Cady is out for revenge in the movies, too, but there\u2019s a pleasure he takes (and gives) in the cat-and-mouse games he plays with his targets that hasn\u2019t come through yet.<\/p>\n
As Zack recovers from the severed toe, the episode continues to stoke the discord between the Bowdens and their children, even Natalie, a good-girl type who\u2019s not as prim as they assume. It never occurred to me that the Bowdens would consider the possibility that a drug-addled Zack bit off his own toe \u2014 Tom is told it can be chewed like a \u201cbaby carrot\u201d \u2014 but that\u2019s offered as an explanation since Cady has alibis hemmed up for that evening. But it\u2019s clear that this fresh trauma hasn\u2019t drawn Zack any closer to his parents, who are still grappling with his expulsion from school over an intimate photo he shared of his previous girlfriend. Zack seems to regret that incident, too, but not so much that he doesn\u2019t resent his parents, especially as they take an even heavier hand in trying to \u201chelp\u201d him get back on track.<\/p>\n
\u201cMom and Dad don\u2019t know us,\u201d he tells Natalie, \u201cand we don\u2019t know them.\u201d Zack is undeniably correct about that. His parents don\u2019t know the depth of his volatility and can only gesture feebly at whatever\u2019s bothering him. They also wouldn\u2019t expect Natalie to drink straight from the bottle and have a possibly sapphic interest in her friend. And now that Cady is out of prison and running amok, they\u2019re starting to pick up dark secrets from their parents, too. Natalie is outside their room when her mother asks, \u201cIs there any way Max can know about what we did?\u201d That\u2019s an incriminating question. And she may learn from the answer from Cady\u2019s point of view.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Zack choking on his own severed toe sounds like the fate of a Spinal Tap drummer.<\/p>\n
\u2022 A truly egregious number of cheap jump-scares in this episode: Natalie\u2019s friend ringing the doorbell and slipping into the house behind her, Natalie touching her mom\u2019s shoulder while she\u2019s examining the creepy room where Zack lost his toe, and Anna\u2019s estranged father choosing to drop off a pair of soccer cleats by sneaking through the back gate. Cape Fear can be a horror show without constantly activating the buzzer under its audience\u2019s seats.<\/p>\n
Cady\u2019s power to manipulate people comes through again in his interaction with Ruben, a death-row inmate who mysteriously drops and then, at Cady\u2019s insistence, reopens the appeal that Anna, Noa, and other lawyers are making on his behalf. Why Ruben\u2019s case is so important to Cady remains an open question for now.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Speaking of open questions, who\u2019s the mystery woman Cady spots in the raincoat and face mask?<\/p>\n
\u2022 It still seems absurd for Tom or anyone else to believe that Cady might not have had a role in Zack losing a middle toe, and the claim gets even more absurd when Anna discovers that the language used on a text chain with the \u201cgamer\u201d on Zack\u2019s phone mirrors what Cady says in a televised interview.<\/p>\n
\u2022 One firm connection between all the Cape Fear adaptations is that Cady has money when everyone assumes he does not. That gives him the power to hire lawyers and keep from getting harassed, and now it\u2019s giving him the cash necessary to buy a nice house for himself and the ghosts in his head.<\/p>\n
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