Tales from Apple: Javier Bardem presents the most terrifying Cape Fear
Executive producers Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg and showrunner Nick Antoska present an adaptation of John D. MacDonald's novel Cape Fear. The Russian audience is most familiar with this story from the hit of the same name from the era of video recorders. The main role was played by Robert De Niro, and the director was Scorsese himself. Now Javier Bardem has tried on the villain's image and created a character so predatory, cunning and elusive that he can easily enter the gallery of the most dangerous movie maniacs of the decade. Izvestia has watched the available episodes of the series and tells us what is so frightening and fascinating about it.
Not just a film adaptation
It seems like it's impossible to make a bad movie based on the novel "The Executioners", aka "Cape of Fear". The 1962 noir became a classic and still scares. The 1991 thriller was among Martin Scorsese's best films of that period, and it remains a cult film even now. Now Apple has released a 10-episode show based on the novel — and again, it's an accurate hit, impossible to break away, despite the plot, which is hard to believe. And the main villain has always been played by brilliant artists.: first Robert Mitchum, then Robert De Niro, now Javier Bardem. And each of them has the most frightening image in their entire career. Remember De Niro in Scorsese — he looked like a deranged Terminator-pervert, an infernal prophet who cannot be killed, but who alone seems capable of destroying the whole world if left unchecked. So, Bardem in the new series is even more dangerous — just enough to have nightmares later.
A shot from the movie "Cape of Fear" (1991)
Surely the thought has crept into your head more than once: if you remember Scorsese's super hit so well, why watch all the same, stretched over 10 hours? Did Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, the executive producers of the series, just decide to earn extra money and give such an opportunity to brilliant artists Amy Adams, Javier Bardem and Patrick Wilson?
No, that's a completely different story, and you don't know it for sure. Basically, however, the same starting point. A respectable lawyer learns that his ward has been released from prison after many years in prison. In court, a long time ago, he was already a monster, and now he's just a titan of evil. It becomes clear that all this time he was waiting for an opportunity to get even with the lawyer, but in such a way that it was impossible to undermine: everything the released maniac does is formally legal, and yet the noose around the necks of the lawyer and family members is slowly tightening. That was the main horror of this parable. Modern society is designed in such a way that it is possible to destroy another person while remaining in the legal field, and as a result, a lawyer, a defender of the law, breaks down and violates this law himself.
What is the difference between the new Cape of Fear and the old one?
The series offers a new perspective on this conflict. To begin with, the lawyer here is a woman, not a man. And her husband was a prosecutor at that very trial. Now they have a family, a huge house, and two (rather than one, as before) very difficult teenage children. Robert de Niro's criminal genius Max Cady was a rapist and pervert before prison. Cady Bardema is released after 17 years because there is evidence of his innocence. He may have had a difficult childhood and a toxic personality, but as the national media trumpets, it was prison that made him a monster. If you didn't kill your pregnant wife, but still served 17 years, that's a completely different matter, isn't it?
Previously, there was only one antagonist in Cape Fear who sowed evil, just Cady. This made the plot more schematic and understandable. Damn it, we have to defeat him, and that's it. Now there are many more carriers of evil. A mysterious girl who always has some very sophisticated mind-expanding drugs in her purse. A masked woman who loiters around the neighborhood like a ghost and terrifies even Cady. Repeat offenders, drug dealers, and muscular convicts inhabit the world. And against this background, the Bowden family, the victims of Cady, looks especially bright, because for many years she has been engaged in proving the innocence of those who were wrongfully convicted.
Cady de Niro hung a portrait of Stalin in the most prominent place (it was one of Scorsese's first shots), quoted Nietzsche, the book of Job and US criminal law. His main goal is to rape everyone physically and morally, thereby achieving a symbolic total victory over the world. Cady Bardema is elusive in this sense. He's a brutal killer, but not a rapist. If de Niro immediately told the lawyer that he would know the meaning of the word "loss," then Bardem defiantly joined the Bowden Foundation, and they were forced to preach morality and true justice in an unrighteous world shoulder to shoulder with him.
Danger lurks for the heroes at every turn, and it doesn't always come directly from Cady. Cyberbullying, paparazzi bloggers who come to the girl with obscene questions, personal comments, fake accounts - suspense is multiplied by an order of magnitude by new threats of the digital age. You feel like you have a super-secure smart home with cameras and sensors everywhere. So here's a simple Wi—Fi jammer from the black market - and anyone can come in to you, no one will know anything. With a little bit of AI, your video goes viral, collects millions of likes, and no one will listen to your excuses.
The series is so full of characters, twists and material, so dense that an hour-long episode looks like a full meter, but then for some reason you want to immediately rush to watch more. The color here is also dense, viscous, acidic, not without looking back at Refn. And the aesthetics here are more likely to refer not to Scorsese, but to Hitchcock, who is closer to this adaptation both in pace and nerve, although some episodes resemble David Lynch in irrationality, black humor and quasi-naturalism. There is even a moment when the hero stops in front of the screen, where "Shadow of Doubt" is playing, one of the best Hitchcock thrillers.
Even seasoned critics admit that it is impossible to predict what will happen in the next second. And although at first some of the moves seem absurd and far-fetched, then it turns out that the authors thought through the logic thoroughly, just left the explanations for later. Moreover, Apple didn't even show the entire series to American journalists, so no one knows what awaits us in the finale. One thing is clear: there will be nothing more creepy, clever and slow in the series this season. And everyone wants to know which dish the former chef and now media superstar Max Cady will finally cook. The first course, by the way, and let this be the only spoiler, was the finger of one of the characters.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
