It’s so many years since I saw Cape Fear, perhaps when it came out. In my memory it’s dominated by the denouement, which takes place in the everglades on a boat, in a sequence which I remembered as being half the film, although it turns out it’s only the last twenty minutes or so. The reason the end looms so large is because it truly is a case of Scorsese pushing the boat out. Loads of CGI and De Niro’s portrayal of Jack Cady, always pushing the envelope, goes overboard. I get why the film chose to go where it does, but it felt as though in a bid for an operatic finale, it flirted with anti-climax. There’s nothing subtle about Cape Fear, but it is tremendously well directed. The acting of Lange and Nolte and Lewis is impeccable, the score and the production design and the editing maintain rhythm and tension despite the predictability of the narrative. Meanwhile, De Niro gives the kind of grandstand performance that only he can, relishing the malevolence of his character without ever sacrificing his charisma. (One can’t help thinking that Sorsese’s subsequent use of DeCaprio as a leading man is why so many of his later films feel hollow: DeCaprio wants to be loved too much, he’s never prepared to take the film into the ambivalent Faustian waters that De Niro excelled in as an actor.) Scorsese is having fun, paying homage to the B movie and Hitchcock at the same time, the camera ever ready to zoom in, to capture every nuance of the acting. The Nolte-Lange marriage is completely plausible: two fearsome egos whose shared happiness is a delicate balancing act. The film was so much better in the viewing than it had been in the memory. However the finale, with its pretensions of showing the family stripped back to a kind of Simian primitivity, overshadows all that comes before.
No comments:
Post a Comment