How one feels about Apple TV’s new 10-part Cape Fear adaptation will depend largely on whether one buys Javier Bardem’s well-worn tough-guy routine. In 2012’s James Bond movie, Skyfall, the Spaniard played an ex-MI6 agent damaged in body and soul, but he hid his character’s depravity behind a layer of icy politeness. Even the 57-year-old’s most celebrated role, as the hitman Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007), featured similar choices: dead-eyed serenity masking murderous intent. I found both of those performances mannered and obnoxious. Go ahead and put my critics’ guild application in the trash. For those who disagree, the new series offers yet another exercise in elegantly veiled menace.
Bardem plays Max Cady, a deranged ex-con previously portrayed by Robert Mitchum in the 1962 film and by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake. In both movies, Cady left prison only after completing his full sentence for rape, a circumstance meant to put his villainy beyond doubt. Here, in keeping with contemporary preoccupations, the fellow may well have been innocent in the first place. Released after the discovery of new evidence, the now-hardened Cady returns to Savannah, Georgia, to confront the lawyers who put him away.
In an irony in which showrunner Nick Antosca clearly delights, one of those attorneys, Anna Bowden (Amy Adams), now works for the Savannah Justice League Project, a leftist nonprofit group that aids the wrongfully jailed but that pointedly did nothing for Cady. Though Anna represented the older man at trial 17 years earlier, she believed him guilty then and convinced him to take a plea. Worse still, she ended up marrying Cady’s prosecutor, Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson), shortly thereafter. One needn’t be Captain Ahab to fathom why revenge might be on the convicted man’s mind.
These changes matter. In the 1962 film, directed by J. Lee Thompson, Bowden’s job as an attorney was used merely to signal his belief in the civic order, a faith soon tested by his lawless antagonist. By turning Bowden into Cady’s defense attorney, as Scorsese’s remake did, the narrative set aside that lofty conflict in favor of an unphilosophical duel. Apple’s series goes further, introducing more than one hint that both prosecutor (Tom) and defender (Anna) conspired against Cady for reasons of their own. Throw in insinuations about Anna’s daughter’s parentage — did the young defense counselor sleep with her client? — and one is left with an almost cartoonishly soapy treatment of the Cape Fear story.
Not helping matters are the series’s outrageous stylistic choices, among them a level of violence rarely seen on prestige (or any) TV. Flashing back to Cady’s prison years, the production shows us gore from which even HBO’s Oz would have turned blushingly away. For the first time ever, I found myself approving of a pre-episode “trigger warning” concerning suicide. So grotesque is the scene in question that I wouldn’t mind unwatching it myself.
Yet the show’s luridness is not only a function of its shattered skulls. It practically drips from the walls of the Bowdens’ grand, overdecorated Victorian home, where lavish murals announce a particular kind of moneyed ease. Though it feels ridiculous to say so, I kept expecting to see a slave, followed inevitably by an antebellum timeline “reveal.” Perhaps the simplest explanation is that Antosca means to emphasize the “Southern” in Southern Gothic. Jefferson Davis himself would not be out of place in the Bowdens’ sprawling manse. However, I prefer another interpretation: that the showrunner hates his protagonists, and their gauche taste is a visual means to signal his disapproval.
Something similar is at work in Anna’s politics. A figure so self-satisfied she nearly floats, our heroine must be taught a crucial lesson about human nature. Or the opposite is the case: so corrupt is fallen man that Anna’s do-gooding is for naught. Either way, the joke is on the white gentry liberals who “write bigger checks” if they can “get their pictures taken with a real, live exoneree,” as Anna’s colleague cynically notes. If Cady is guilty, then the leftists who embrace him are fools choking on their white guilt to their own destruction. If he is innocent, then “the system” really has made him into a monster. What aid can ever be sufficient?
It is not too much to say that Bardem’s character is engineered specifically to make progressives look like idiots. Having (most likely) drugged Anna’s teenage son and severed his toe, Cady nonetheless persuades our heroine to represent him in a lawsuit. Encountering a “feminist” fangirl in a park, Cady smears ice cream on her face and menacingly licks it off. As a conservative, I should enjoy these illustrations of Robert Frost’s dictum that a liberal is one who won’t “take [her] own side in a quarrel.” Heaven knows Bardem is having a good time. Still, his performance here left me just as cold as his previous lowlife turns. Give me Mitchum’s lazy charisma over the Spaniard’s theatricality every time.
IN APPLE TV’S ‘STAR CITY,’ RUSSIANS BEAT US TO THE MOON
If it had been confined to a 100-minute movie, Apple’s garish production might have been an amusing if imperfect take on the Cape Fear narrative. At more than eight hours, though, the series is so bloated and misshapen that police would struggle to identify the body. Indeed, Apple’s episode synopses alone convey the futility of so lengthy an adaptation: “Max settles in”; “Tom invites a coworker over.” The show isn’t exactly boring, but neither does it treat its life-or-death material with the urgency it deserves.
Instead, audiences get scene after scene of plotting that could hardly be further from the point: Anna’s daughter’s budding lesbianism, her son’s sins against #MeToo, invasive wildlife, an annoying documentary team. For viewers who share my ideas about pacing, much time will likely be spent shouting at the screen, “Who cares?!” We all know, by this point, where any version of Cape Fear is going. Let’s hurry up and get there.
Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.