Cape Fear’s Destination Unknown

Spoilers follow for the Apple TV limited series Cape Fear through fifth episode “Faith,” which premiered on June 26, and the source material that inspired it. 

Five hours into Apple TV’s Cape Fear adaptation — twice as long as both film versions of John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners, which also served as inspirations for this TV series — who is Max Cady (Javier Bardem)? What do we know that he’s done, and what do we expect that he’s going to do? Yes, his onetime defense lawyer, Anna (Amy Adams), later married his prosecutor, Tom (Patrick Wilson), and Cady went to prison. But what did the Bowdens do to him before they were a combined unit? What tendrils of righteousness, revenge, crime, and punishment tie these people together? Why, exactly, are we watching the new Cape Fear?

Forgive me for emphasizing plot over vibes; suspense has value, especially in a serialized TV narrative. But key to all iterations of Cape Fear has been a set of facts that signal to the audience where this story is going to go and, in their initial certainty, toy with our own personal moral codes. MacDonald’s novel and the two big-screen versions of it all share that early definitiveness: Cady’s crimes, his nemesis Sam Bowden’s role in sending him to prison, and Cady’s vow to ruin Sam’s life. Laying all this out is essential to Cape Fear, because it sets up our allegiances — surely against Cady, because nothing that Sam could do to him would be as bad as Cady’s crimes … right? After Cape Fear anchors us in those assurances, the men’s enmity continues manipulating our expectations and our beliefs. Cape Fear is so unsettling and so enduring exactly because it’s not a mystery of the characters’ actions. It’s a mystery of our reactions, how we judge Cady’s punishment and Sam’s ethics.

Halfway through its ten-episode first season, Nick Antosca’s series lacks the basic elements that make Cape Fear, down to the inciting incident. No longer is Cady an unrepentant rapist whom the lawyer Sam sent away, horrified by Cady’s violence and concerned about what men like Cady could do to Bowden’s own teenage daughter. Now, Cady is a former restaurateur and womanizer who became a tabloid sensation after his pregnant wife disappeared; his defense attorney, the young, pregnant, alcoholic Anna, seemingly guided him toward a plea deal engineered by Tom. (There’s a lot of seeming in these first episodes.) Seventeen or so years later, Cady gets out of prison after an ex-girlfriend confesses to killing his wife and then kills herself. Suddenly he’s in Anna and Tom’s cloistered Savannah neighborhood, promising that he bears no ill will but also edging his way into their lives. Anna’s boss at an Innocence Project–style nonprofit sees Cady as a perfect fundraising opportunity and orders Anna to work with him. Anna and Tom’s daughter, Natalie (Lily Collias), views Cady as a source who might finally tell her the truth about her uptight mother and avoidant stepfather. Their son, Zack (Joe Anders), becomes obsessed with reading about Cady’s case, and starts imagining an AI-generated version of Cady’s son, Adam.

Adaptations will always change things about their source material. These narrative excursions are distractions, though, from this Cape Fear’s inherent hollowness. We don’t know what Cady did, whether he actually killed his pregnant wife or not. We don’t know how responsible he is for the weird shit happening to the Bowdens after his release, like Zack disappearing one night and returning so high that he can’t remember why he bit off his own toe. We don’t know what Anna and Tom might have learned about Cady during his trial that pushed them toward each other. We don’t know how Tom feels about having left the state attorney’s office for big-bucks defense work, if it weighs on him or has caused tension in his marriage with Anna now that she’s devoted to helping the underprivileged. Antosca has turned Cape Fear into a puzzle-box mystery where no one’s motivations are clear enough to make us feel anything more than blandly curious, and the result is a muddled, diffuse mess whose best attributes are the visual elements the series apes from the 1991 film directed by Martin Scorsese, who’s an EP here. (No one’s sweaty enough for either the Deep South setting or the characters’ compromised principles, but those extreme Dutch angles and the photonegative color theory sure do amp up the pulp factor.)

Still, Cape Fear’s arresting look can’t cover up how it hasn’t yet established a compelling baseline as to these people’s inner lives — their moral code, goals, or regrets — and without that baseline, none of this has resonance. Not the foreboding stuff, like the family of drowned skunks Cady might’ve dumped in the Bowdens’ beautiful pool, or Juliette Lewis’s presence as Cady’s stalker with whom he has some kind of sexual, and familial, history. (In Scorsese’s version, she played Sam’s teen daughter, Dani, whom Cady targeted as part of his revenge plot.) Not the family stuff, like Natalie’s spontaneous nipple piercing after making out with Cady’s maybe-daughter, Nevaeh (Malia Pyles), who later murders her own mother after kissing her, for way too long, on the mouth. Not even Cady himself matters, even though Antosca fashions Bardem’s iteration after prior versions of the character, complete with mythical-seeming tattoos, a haberdashery’s worth of woven fedoras, and an ever-present sneer. Maybe, this Cape Fear suggests, Cady was innocent all along and Tom and Anna are the villains for putting him away. Maybe the real baddie is the criminal-justice system that turned the possibly innocent Cady into a brain-damaged monster while he was inside. Maybe the problem is us for being primed to accept a Spanish-accented man as capable of killing the woman he pledged his life to. Or maybe the problem is Cape Fear itself for being too cowardly to commit to the certainty that drove the previous versions of this story.

In The Executioners, and the 1962 and 1991 film adaptations of that novel, Cady is a predator specifically of women — even more specifically, young women — and he’s known for this, more so than his sneakiness, cleverness, or time served. The inarguability of the rapes Cady commits, how casually he treats them, and how desperate all of his foes become to protect the women in their charge from Cady’s malevolence are the foundations upon which Cape Fear is built as a narrative, a character study, and a cautionary tale. Cape Fear is a story about sexual violence so abhorrent that Cady becomes an increasingly literal incarnation of devilish evil requiring escalating immorality to combat it; in Scorsese’s film, the guy starts speaking in tongues. Also in Scorsese’s film, Cady’s crimes are so galling that Sam, Cady’s defense lawyer, breaks his own oath to his client and hides evidence that might have helped get Cady off (a change from MacDonald’s novel). Sam neglects the standards of his profession to protect women who Cady could hurt, especially someone like Sam’s virginal teen daughter, Dani. Was Sam right to abandon his integrity, or did his collapse of professional principles make him not so unlike Cady? Does his constant womanizing make him not so unlike Cady, too? How slippery is the slope of depravity? That’s for us to decide.

None of this is to suggest that Cape Fear’s failing so far is because the TV series went with Cady as a suspected murderer rather than a definitive rapist or because it didn’t show us a rape scene. The nature of the crimes isn’t necessarily the problem. The problem is the nature of their presentation, and their integration into the series, because it obscures what’s really at stake in this Cape Fear for Cady, the Bowdens, and the society that created them. Saddling Cady with a traumatic childhood to raise questions of nature versus nurture, and giving the Bowdens predictable married-couple problems to make us wonder whether all that money is really feeding their souls, are ancillary questions. They are, in fact, distractions from what should be Cape Fear’s driving ideas: What happens to a man like Max Cady when he’s caged, what happens to society when he’s free, and what is the moral cost of trying to, in Rust Cohle’s words, keep a bad man from the door?

Instead of Cady as rapist, Cape Fear seems to be going for a general theme of Cady as violator, someone who is trespassing not singularly on a female body but on the Bowdens’ trustworthiness. That’s such a broad change that it loses Cape Fear’s intrinsic urgency. Cady may be chipping away at the versions of the Bowdens that they’ve presented to their children, to their colleagues, and to high society; without a clear motivation, though, these effects don’t hit like they should. We don’t know what Cady is capable of because we don’t know what he’s done. Max Cady should be an unsettling interruption, a man who undermines our ideas of right and wrong through his nonchalance about his own wickedness; here, the most unsettling thing about him are those teal contact lenses.