Rediscovering A Great Film: Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear

So I very randomly watched Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear this week, and fell in love with it in a way I hadn’t before. Previously I dismissed it as good, competent work-man-Scorsese; a good, solid mainstream film that didn’t reach the peaks of the powerhouse director’s more prominent artistic works, like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. And it still is that—a solid, mainstream work-man picture—but I’m no longer as dismissive. It’s got a complexity and an intensity to it that most mainstream thrillers could only hope for, with Robert DeNiro at the center of everything great about it.

What ever happened to this DeNiro? The current DeNiro, even when he's not working on middling mainstream comedies, hasn't had this kind of intensity in a long time. This is probably his last great great performance. I have profound respect for his work in Heat and Casino, which both came out a few years later, but even those performances pale next to this one. DeNiro is scary in this movie. He’s unstoppable in the same way that Terminator and the T-1000 are in the Terminator, only more intense because he's actually a believable, real-life human being. No obstacle gets in the way of the revenge he wants; neither physical pain nor the law. And he’s just as scary intellectually as he is physically.  Once an illiterate redneck, he now has conversations with Nolte's daughter about classic works of literature and "roman a clefs."

And Nick Nolte is good too, as the man DeNiro seeks revenge against. It would have been easy to cast someone weaker and less intense in this role, like a Tom Hanks (bad example, I know) -- someone who could have cowered more in the face of such a menacing threat. It also would have been easy to write the family all as complete innocents having to face off against DeNiro’s pure evil. But as this is a Scorsese picture, he takes none of those easy routes. Nolte’s character is slightly morally corrupt – he was neglectful as a professional while working as DeNiro’s court-appointed attorney, and he’s cheating on his wife as the film opens. What this allows the DeNiro character to do is something even more menacing than simply stalking and threatening the family – he manipulates and attacks them by subtly exposing and contributing to the family's already-existent fault lines.

It also has one of my favourite movie posters of all time. This image says so much about the movie: the lightning cracking eerily over the houseboat and seascape, DeNiro’s hateful eyes looking over the family photo that’s symbolically ripping apart... It's a powerful image. I remember seeing this poster every day in middle school, hung up on the wall of the drama classroom.

So, my conclusion? This is an amazing piece of work from one of the masters, and the last great collaboration from one of the greatest director/actor-relationships in film history.