Cape Fear Drowned in the Mystery

Spoilers follow for this season of Cape Fear through season finale “The Executioners,” which premiered on Apple TV on July 31. 

“Max was a victim,” reads the T-shirt worn by a Max Cady admirer in Cape Fear finale “The Executioners,” a tidy encapsulation of the Apple TV series’ clumsy approach of taking elements from previous iterations of Cape Fear and flipping them 180 degrees just because. The Bowdens turned Max into a monster by sending him to prison for a crime they weren’t sure he had actually committed. The Bowdens failed their children by neglecting them so much that they lost their identities. And in the series’ most tacky inversion, the big bad wasn’t a predator of women but a woman predator. Adding Juliette Lewis, who played the 15-year-old that Max lusted after in the 1991 film adaptation, as his conniving and murderous half-sister, Crystal, in this adaptation is amusing stunt casting. It’s also a sign of how creatively limp Cape Fear ultimately was.

With little thematic connective tissue to its source material, Cape Fear amounted to a screengrab adaptation: a series more interested in gothic visuals like Max lurking atop the Bowdens’ roof like a gargoyle, or Anna swimming away from a houseboat in a long uninterrupted shot, than in making sense of its tangled web of villainy and victimhood. Cape Fear changing the story’s structure from a straightforward moral drama to a puzzle-box mystery about what Anna and Tom Bowden really did to Max, and whether Max really killed his pregnant wife, deadened the series’ forward momentum up through the final few episodes, which relied on what recapper Scott Tobias perfectly described as “exposition boxes” to wrap up loose threads. The more Cape Fear turned its back on the core element of its predecessors — Max as a definitive sexual abuser — the more clear it became that the series had no firm idea about who Max is. Javier Bardem was popping off, but the writing failed his characterization time and time again. Max was supposed to be irresistible, but we never saw him charm a woman who didn’t seem borderline deranged or ambitious to a fault. Even when it finally confirmed that Max slept with a blacked-out Anna, the series shied away from characterizing him as an opportunistic rapist; Amy Adams should have had more to work with than just one vague conversation about what might or might not have occurred on that night. Did Max actually love his wife and son and feel guilt over their deaths, or are his visions of them mere specters of the brain damage caused by his prison attack? The mute figures of his wife, Melissa, and his son, Adam, weren’t as illuminating as Cape Fear thought they were.

All of this imprecision around Max allowed Cape Fear to play coy with the question that anchored previous versions of this story: Who is the more immoral party here? The Bowdens, who act without the full truth because they have a gut feeling that Max is guilty? Or Max, who was an asshole but whose life was ruined because Tom and Anna made an assumption? But as it turns out, the imprecision was required for Cape Fear to cue up a deus ex machina straight out of the hold of the houseboat Galilee. Lewis has been on the fringes of the series from the beginning, her face hidden behind a mask when she bumped into Anna at the hospital and then revealed on an old-school TV that fires up in Max’s hotel room and plays a video of her singing, “What do they know about love, my dear?” (Another screengrab that has more impact than its corresponding characterization.) If the “Max is a victim” present-day framing wasn’t obvious enough, Lewis’s Crystal Delilah Cady, nicknamed Lila, helped build out a pained backstory involving Max and Crystal’s abusive father, Robert. Every parent in Cape Fear has failed a child — Tom’s parents lied to him about how his older brother died, Anna’s father was an addict, Tom and Anna are absent parents to Natalie and Zack, Max manipulates his daughter Nevaeh into terrorizing the Bowdens and his other (maybe) daughter Natalie into distrusting her parents and tries to frame her for murder. But Crystal, whom Lewis plays with loopy irregularity, a breathy little-girl voice, and loose-limbed, manic physicality, was particularly damaged.

Was Crystal’s brain broken by Robert, by Max, or by both? Cape Fear isn’t quite clear about this; from Max, we hear only his side of their relationship: “Her contempt changed into desire, and Lila fell in love with the boy … He used her love to punish her … When someone really wrongs you, you find your way and you take your time to make that someone feel the way you felt.” Crystal doesn’t really get an account of why or how she fell for her half-brother because Cape Fear is far less interested in its female characters’ decision-making processes than in using them to deepen the mystery surrounding Max. More often than not, they are a means toward an ill-considered storytelling end, nudging these characters toward the villain role Cape Fear spent too long dangling over Max. Nevaeh’s character could have been an interesting commentary on the Bowdens’ white privilege and on how Anna reflexively distrusts a POC teen hanging out with her children; instead, Nevaeh’s antics at Max’s behest, like seducing both Bowden teens, introducing them to illegal drugs, breaking into other rich people’s houses, and beating Natalie up in jail, reproduce an array of crazy-Latina clichés. Crystal could have served as the cautionary tale Anna refused to be, the woman who fell for Max’s promises and willingly destroyed her own life to do what he wanted; instead, she’s a plot device who is still being manipulated by Max to antagonize Anna and is revealed at the 11th hour as the crazed admirer who killed Melissa and cut Adam out of her stomach. What did Crystal ever actually want? Why would she torture Max with the dog collar if she loved him? Why wouldn’t she tell him, in her last minutes alive, that Luke was actually his son Adam? (For that matter, why wouldn’t Max, who was just told by Anna that he has a teenage son out there, realize that a teenage boy hanging out with Crystal and Robert just might be his missing son?) Crystal’s motivations aren’t coherent because Crystal herself was never meant to be. She existed only so Cape Fear could keep prioritizing mystery over character.

That same mentality drives the seriess final twist of keeping Max alive to possibly attack the Bowdens again, which sets it apart from John D. MacDonald’s source-material novel, The Executioners, and the 1991 film from Martin Scorsese. In both those preceding versions, Cady dies, killed by the Bowdens in defense of their family. In this one, as Anna and Tom try to drown Max, Anna realizes that Natalie is screaming for them to kill him. Natalie’s embrace of vigilante justice is a sobering moment for Anna that’s meant to implicate us, too. Why are we so willing to perpetuate a cycle of violence? Aren’t we just as bad as Max? Yet that message doesn’t hit as intensely as it should when Cape Fear has done so much to diffuse Max’s villainy, turning him into a nature-versus-nurture symbol whose formative crime was committed by his sister instead.

Even in its closing minutes, Cape Fear treats its women interchangeably, and superficially, to maintain its status as a puzzle rather than a parable. This is the height of its screengrab-adaptation approach, its concluding image hinting at the potential for a second season while inadvertently communicating the series’ internal confusion over its female characters. In the final scenes, Natalie chooses not to open the DNA results that would prove if Cady — the man she so badly wanted dead — is her biological father, as he claimed to be. Later, as Anna smiles at her family as they gather for a barbecue, she senses something malevolent in their backyard and turns around; the last frame is her frozen face turned blood-red via the series’ saturated color theory. It’s an echo of the 1991 Cape Fear, in which Lewis’s Dani gazed where Cady had drowned, her eyes-only closeup communicating how much she’d been changed by this man who tried to rape her. She’s brushed up against evil, and she’s survived, and she won’t look away. Here, why does Anna get the series’ final look and not Natalie? Cape Fear has left the door open for a return of Max Cady, but what about his story as told in this season suggests that there’s more to plumb? What about Anna’s fear warrants the all-red color flood, rather than Natalie’s rejection of Cady’s continued influence on her life? Because choosing mystery over certainty, and consequently treating a woman’s emotions nonsensically, is the only new idea this Cape Fear had.