Cape Fear Recap: Making a Monster

cape fear
Why Would I Want to Hurt You?
Season 1 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating ★★★
Previous Next
Previous Episode
Next Episode

The Max Cady of the two Cape Fear movies — and the John D. MacDonald novel that inspired them — 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’s character for offering the eyewitness testimony that got him locked up for sexual assault. The ’91 version has Nick Nolte’s lawyer burying a piece of evidence about the victim’s supposed “promiscuity” 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’s potential for violence, the film shows him viciously assaulting the lawyer’s would-be mistress as part of a psychological campaign against him.) Cady may or may not have been wronged in these films, but there’s little doubt that he’s done (and can do) some awful things.

There’s still a lot we don’t 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 ’91 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!

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 ’91 Cape Fear, where Robert De Niro’s Cady has an entire phone conversation hanging from a bar, Javier Bardem’s 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’t just a landing spot for convicted criminals but a place where they can change dramatically for the worse.

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’re doing on behalf of the wrongly convicted, so she waved away his mother’s urgent concerns over his behavior since he returned home. Following up on the ominous image of the mother’s 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: “Prison 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’t recognize.” Byron had made that transformation. 

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’ll be interesting to see how far this Cape Fear presses the issue. Is this going to be a series about the “criminal injustice” 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?

For the time being, it’s putting the clamps on Bardem’s Max Cady, who possesses neither the sinister cool of Robert Mitchum in the ’62 Cape Fear nor the often hilarious redneck bravado of De Niro in the ’91 version. Bardem’s 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’s mirthless, relentless inevitability. What’s 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’s a pleasure he takes (and gives) in the cat-and-mouse games he plays with his targets that hasn’t come through yet.

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’s 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 — Tom is told it can be chewed like a “baby carrot” — but that’s offered as an explanation since Cady has alibis hemmed up for that evening. But it’s clear that this fresh trauma hasn’t 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’t resent his parents, especially as they take an even heavier hand in trying to “help” him get back on track. 

“Mom and Dad don’t know us,” he tells Natalie, “and we don’t know them.” Zack is undeniably correct about that. His parents don’t know the depth of his volatility and can only gesture feebly at whatever’s bothering him. They also wouldn’t 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’re starting to pick up dark secrets from their parents, too. Natalie is outside their room when her mother asks, “Is there any way Max can know about what we did?” That’s an incriminating question. And she may learn from the answer from Cady’s point of view. 

Weeping Willows

• Zack choking on his own severed toe sounds like the fate of a Spinal Tap drummer. 

• A truly egregious number of cheap jump-scares in this episode: Natalie’s friend ringing the doorbell and slipping into the house behind her, Natalie touching her mom’s shoulder while she’s examining the creepy room where Zack lost his toe, and Anna’s 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’s seats.

Cady’s power to manipulate people comes through again in his interaction with Ruben, a death-row inmate who mysteriously drops and then, at Cady’s insistence, reopens the appeal that Anna, Noa, and other lawyers are making on his behalf. Why Ruben’s case is so important to Cady remains an open question for now. 

• Speaking of open questions, who’s the mystery woman Cady spots in the raincoat and face mask? 

• 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 “gamer” on Zack’s phone mirrors what Cady says in a televised interview. 

• 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’s giving him the cash necessary to buy a nice house for himself and the ghosts in his head.