Whenever I find myself on the wrong side of a consensus, I can usually see it coming. I’ve been writing about film and TV professionally for a long time, and that tends to warp your tastes after a while. You end up looking for and being satisfied by different things. And yet I’m so confident that Apple TV’s Cape Fear is good, it always throws me for a loop when fans treat each new episode as though it has personally insulted them. I thought the latest outing was really good, amping up the weirdness to chilling effect. But apparently there’s such a thing as too weird. And we may well have reached it.
Is ‘Cape Fear’ Too Crazy?
Over on Reddit, you can seemingly always rely on GravyBear16 for an adroit summary of where things stand:
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u/Justp1ayin from discussionin
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It’s flippant, but it’s an essential point. I find the show to be the opposite of unserious, for the most part; I find it to be deeply weird and uncomfortable in a way that genuinely benefits it. Sure, there are dumb bits, especially if you pick at them in isolation, but the overall effect is compelling. To me, anyway.
Maybe it’s a taste thing. The recurring sentiment I keep seeing is that this is schlocky, turn-your-brain-off soapy nonsense, and should be enjoyed on those guilty-pleasure terms. But it’s produced by Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, and while their involvement is probably nominal, they still felt comfortable attaching their names to it. It feels like that kind of project to me, but to many, it feels like a complete mess.
Magic Max
My favourite thing about Cape Fear is Javier Bardem’s performance as Max Cady. This seems largely uncontroversial. Some people aren’t buying it, sure, but for the most part, he seems to be the least contentious element. That’s in terms of the performance, though. The handling of the character seems to be another matter. From one user:
absolute dumpster fire, everything and everyone is all over the place. why does Max Cady show up randomly in every damn scene? it’s nauseating lol. the family are all bat-sh*t crazy. it’s a train wreck soap opera full of chaos one scene after another lol.
Even I kind of get the issue of Max just turning up in places randomly. It happens all the time. In the most recent episode, it happened repeatedly, almost always involving Tom, who thought it would be a good idea to go for a full night out with a guy he put behind bars. When it’s broken down this way, it’s easy to argue that Cape Fear has a bit of an issue with structure:
I am convinced ChatGPT wrote this show. It’s mostly the same handful of scenes over and over. The husband is at a bar or restaurant and out of nowhere Max Cady walks in. Amy Adams breathlessly tries to convince someone to believe her. The son does something weird and his sister is rebellious, over and over.
There’s definitely a fair argument here, especially regarding Max. It’s almost as if to perpetuate the mystique around the character, he has a preternatural ability to just appear wherever the main characters are. I’d argue, though, that this is a stylistic choice. At its most fundamental level, this is a show about someone stalking a couple and inserting himself into every aspect of their lives. Literalising that notion feels like a deliberate choice to me. But I’ll happily concede that it can be a little silly.
Suffer the Children
Perhaps the biggest bone of contention is the child characters, particularly Zach and Natalie, but also Nevaeh. The ironically-named — at least I hope so — user “mediocreidiot” described her opening scene in Episode 5 thusly:
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u/Justp1ayin from discussionin
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Fans have already complained about Nevaeh, so this seems to be a recurring theme. Zach isn’t winning any friends either, and this one I can kind of understand. His weirdness is determined and, for the most part, seems to occur mostly for its own sake. He eats fruit strangely, tries to kiss his sister, makes funny looks at his mother, and falls into a wide-eyed, trance-like state. He’s intended to be a kind of parody of red pill incel culture, but the depiction is pretty flat.
Interestingly, Joe Anders, who plays Zach, is Kate Winslet’s son, so the accusation of nepotism naturally follows his role in the show. I’d hate to cast any undue aspersions, but it kind of tracks.
Either way, the big question is whether Cape Fear can do something to turn fan sentiment around, or whether it’s just striking a particularly divisive tone that a fair helping of people simply aren’t going to like. As I say, I really enjoy it, and I find it very impressive in a lot of respects, even while I can happily acknowledge some of the issues. But based on how things are going, it’s likely to become more of a trainwreck, not less, and it’ll be interesting to see how the audience responds.
