Cape Fear (1991)

Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear adds complexity while retaining the essential storyline and even movie score by Bernard Hermann from the 1962 film.  In the original, Max Cady’s motive seemed to be revenge.  He was angry that Bowden’s testimony as a witness to his crime placed him in jail.  The circumstances are different in Scorsese’s version.  We learn that Bowden was Cady’s attorney in a trial for assault, and that Bowden suppressed evidence showing the victim’s history of promiscuous behavior.  Cady’s discovery of the suppressed evidence motivates his quest for revenge.  It also becomes the original sin at the heart of Bowden’s character.

Another difference is Bowden’s marriage.  In Scorsese’s version it is deeply troubled.  Bowden (Nick Nolte) has moved his family to New Essex, NC, from Atlanta to make a new start after infidelity led to a crisis in his marriage.  In New Essex, he and his wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) struggle to hold things together.  Leigh worries that he is having another affair.  The atmosphere is tense.  Leigh is trying to pursue a career as a designer.  She alludes to “lost years” in her life, and she’s probably referring to years she has lost to the marriage.  The daughter Danielle is a fifteen-year-old recently suspended from school for smoking marijuana. She feels the tension in her parents’ marriage, hears their arguments, and is unhappy.  Cady exploits all of these weaknesses.  Perhaps the most uncomfortable scene in the film comes when he lures Danielle into the basement of her high school, pretending to be her drama teacher.  This is essentially a seduction scene, where Cady convinces her of his sincerity by referring to private details of her life and her parents’ marriage.  He convinces her that they share much in common and asks if he can put his arm around her.  Even though she recognizes him as the man who has been stalking her family, she allows him.  He makes her suspicious of her parents and what they’ve told her. 

In the 1962 film, Cady reads legal books in prison.  We know little about his background other than the fact than he grew up in difficult lower economic class circumstances.  In Scorsese’s version, Cady goes to jail for 14 years rather than 8 and although he is illiterate when convicted he learns to read in prison and reads widely.  In addition to law, we know he’s read philosophy, including Nietzsche, and he’s a fan of Henry Miller.  He’s read Look Homeward, Angel (a novel whose attitude towards the past provides a faint undertone in the film) and talks with Danielle about it.  Cady’s an intelligent, self-educated psychopath, enamored of the culture whose art and literature and music he’s come to love, enraged that he can’t participate in the affluence of people like Bowden.  Like his predecessor in the 1962 film, he’s jealous of Bowden’s economic status.  He knows that, were it not for his jail time and the economic facts of his birth and upbringing, not to mention luck, he could live the life that Bowden lives.  This enrages him.

Scorsese’s film is more psychological in focus than the original, although in both films Cady understands how to inflict terror.  De Niro’s Cady is more aggressive, more violent, and more ingenious than Mitchum’s. 

De Niro is great as Cady, but you know it’s a role, a part he’s playing.  He never melds with it.  The same can be said for the other characters, with the exception of Danielle, who’s convincing as the vulnerable and psychologically damaged adolescent.  The Bowden family dynamics seem false, and the actors don’t convincingly inhabit their roles.  When the terror begins, the family behaves as if being stalked and threatened is normal.  They walk along the sidewalks of the town, talking to one another about their plans to resist Cady.  They suspect Cady has already entered their house, that he’s poisoned their dog.  In general he’s created a menacing atmosphere. Paranoia and anxiety ought to have set in much earlier than it does.

The 1962 film has simplicity.  It does not weigh us down with complicated information about Bowden’s marriage and past.  It does not draw out elaborately the character of Cady and instead works in reductive, simplistic fashion to conjure a narrative of revenge and fear.  Although, in a sense, the 1991 film gives us more to think and talk about, in particular with respect to Cady’s character, the 1962 film is a more seamless, more effective story.

While the South was a background in the original, Scorsese foregrounds it.  We see images of the Confederate flag, and Cady’s past is clearly one of fundamentalism and biblical literalism.  He’s covered with tattoos that use the Biblical language of sin and redemption.  Cady reminds me of the main character in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Parker’s Back.” His frequent Biblical references suggest O’Connor’s character the Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”  The South is a center of fundamentalism.  Scorsese uses associations with the South of violence, religious mania, and the subjugation of women as a way of building Cady’s character as well as Bowden’s.

Fear of rape is an issue in the 1991 film, but it is not its heart.  We know Cady plans to have sex with Bowden’s wife and daughter, consensual sex if he can convince them, but the central horror in the film is not the prospect of rape but rather the total destruction that he wants to inflict.

De Niro’s Cady is a psychopath.  Bowden as played by Nolte comes close to becoming a psychopath himself.  Cady several times tells Bowden how much they’re alike, how they’re equals. One of his goals is to reduce Bowden to his level.  He succeeds.

 

Mud

Caveats:  Mud (2012; dir. Jeff Nichols) makes some unwelcome compromises.  As dark as it is, it ends in a way that allows us too much satisfaction--the visceral pleasure of watching the bad guys blown away, the happy discovery by Ellis that even though his parents’ separation may be permanent they still love him (sentimental).  Then of course there is the final revelation that Mud himself has survived.  The defeat of the Bad Guys in particular, a gang of hapless and ineffectual thugs hired to kill Mud by the father of a man he killed out of jealousy is unlikely.  They are heavily armed.  They know exactly where Mud is.  They blast repeatedly through the flimsy walls of the house where Ellis and his family live and no one (no one!) is hit.  Mud himself suffers injury only after diving into the water.  Conversely, all the gang members are shot to death by Mud or Ellis’s father or the old man across the river (reputed to have been a military assassin or sniper) with his high-power long distance sniper’s rifle.  It’s all just improbable.  And the final cliché—that of the ne’er do well Mud who finally asserts moral and physical heroism—well, it’s too predictable.

In the film’s larger context these reservations are minor.  Characters are the film’s strength, along with the Arkansas background, which changes back and forth between the seediness of a languishing small town, the riverbank life of fishermen still trying to earn a living by their catch, and the island where much of the film takes place.  Change infiltrates everything.  Ellis and his friend Neckbone are both entering adolescence and puberty.  Ellis is already attracted to older girls and shows signs of being a future ladies’ man.  His parents’ marriage is deteriorating.  People who live in rickety shacks and trailers along the river are gradually moving to town.  We find here the same static small town atmosphere evident in Nichol’s first two films, Shotgun Stories (2007) and Take Shelter (2011).  The atmosphere can be suffocating, closed in, and you sense that characters want to escape even if they’re not aware of it themselves.

As a young adolescent male Ellis is a passionate romantic.  He can’t understand why his parents would drift apart--because they are supposed to love each other.  He takes up the cause of Mud and his girlfriend because they are “in love.”  He’s unaware of complexities, and part of the poignancy of the film is the outer world of adult reality that the boys know little about.  Things are going on, problems being worked out, issues addressed—all beyond their ken.  Thus it’s difficult for Ellis to understand his parents’ breakup, or why Mud and Juniper, both of whom have put each other through the wringer for years, might need to part ways despite their love for each other.  In particular, it’s Mud who the boys understand and connect with on one level and who on another level they don’t understand at all. (I’m tempted to draw a connection with What Maisie Knew (2012) but will refrain (I haven’t seen it yet); however, the child characters of Faulkner’s early novels, especially The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying do come to mind).

Matthew McConaughey as Mud is as good as he’s ever been—certainly better than the Southern Bible-thumping preacher he parodies in Bernie (2011; dir. Richard Linklater).

Django Unchained

Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2012) is a spaghetti western about slavery. Set in Texas and Mississippi in 1858, it follows the trail of a German bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and his associate Django (Jamie Foxx) as they hunt wanted outlaws.  Dr. Schultz’s basic operating procedure is to identify the outlaws and then to shoot them dead, taking their bodies back to the local sheriff to claim the bounties.  To justify his methods, he always points to the wanted poster that says “Wanted Dead or Alive.”  After they dispense with a particularly nasty gang, he gives Foxx his freedom, and together they set out to find Foxx’s wife, who has been sold to a particularly nasty plantation owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) of the plantation Candieland.

This film has all the distinguishing marks of a Tarantino film--moments of comedy followed by scenes of extreme violence. The funniest scene (there aren’t many) comes when a band of hooded men headed to attack the bounty hunters stop to argue about their masks, which do not fit.  The man whose wife made the masks is offended by their discussion and rides off in a huff.  Shortly afterwards most of the masked men die in a bomb blast rigged by the bounty hunters.  Such scenes juxtaposing the comic or bizarre alongside violence are traits of the spaghetti westerns and B-level films Tarantino takes as his models.  Schultz himself drives a closed wagon with a large tooth mounted on a spring on its roof—it wobbles back and forth as he drives—he was once a dentist—the tooth is an ever-present mark of absurdity that would fit right into any number of Sergio Leone films.

Tarantino’s main method in Django and other films is to show horrible scenes of racism, brutality, and suffering that are followed by scenes in which those responsible for the racism, brutality, and suffering receive their violent comeuppance.  Moments of inhumanity followed by violent retribution.  “There is no remission of sins without the shedding of blood.” These scenes provide catharsis, or so I think Tarantino intends, that allow the viewer release from whatever the brutality might be.  This was his approach in Inglourious Basterds (2009).  I didn’t like that film’s heavy-handed distortion of history (all the high command of the Third Reich, including Hitler, are killed in a bomb blast and fire at a movie theater). But here it doesn’t bother me that much.  There is a deliberate broadness to this film’s portrayal of plantation owners, slaves, and lower class whites.  One reviewer noted that it is the broadness one finds in a comic book—there are few if any gradations between good and bad.  Only in the two main characters do we find complexity.

Christoph Waltz creates a truly unusual, distinctive character in Schultz.  He is affable, always calm and sociable, never out of sorts.  He seems to fear nothing.  In his cart with the wobbling tooth, he at first seems a foolish figure, but when he begins to shoot down people in his way we realize he is someone to take seriously.  He decides what he needs to do to achieve his goals, and he does it.  From the earliest moment he makes clear his aversion to slavery, although slavery is not his main concern.  Bounties are.  Moral compunctions don’t slow him down when it comes to killing wanted men.  Finding outlaws and bringing their bodies in for the bounty is what he does.  He agrees to help Django find his wife out of friendship. 

Django begins the film as a beaten-down man in a coffle of slaves being led towards auction.  When Schultz frees Django because he knows what several men Schultz is hunting look like.  The film shows Django’s gradual transformation from oppressed victim to agent of retribution.  Schultz lures him into the bounty hunting business both by the offer of freedom and by the opportunity to shoot white people.  Schultz asks him, after one successful episode, how he likes bounty hunting, and Django answers, “Kill white people and get paid for it? What’s not to like?” After Schultz frees him, they set out to find his missing wife.  But the search for his wife, and the desire to punish those who mistreated her, gradually becomes a quest to punish those who practice slavery.

The final scene in the film, in which Django slaughters every member and worker of Candieland and then blows the plantation house up in a tremendous explosion is the expected cathartic moment.  But what does it accomplish?  It does away with the bad guys (and woman).  It allows Django to ride away with his wife.  In reality, it’s not likely they would have survived long into the night, given the historical place and time of the action.  But the film doesn’t show reality.

Perhaps the most unsettling character in the film is Stephen, the head slave of Calvin Candie.  Played by an almost unrecognizable Samuel K. Jackson, the character seems to have been designed to resemble the bug-eyed stereotypes of slavery.  He shucks and jives, speaks in a heavy dialect (of the sort that whites would imagine for him), and is wholly devoted both to his master and to slavery in general.  Any challenge to that Institution enrages him.  Slavery gives him his position of power and influence as the head slave of Candie’s plantation.  He is the incarnation of what slavery in one sense sought to accomplish—the complete deformation of a human individual.  Stephen has no sense of himself as a slave, as a person of color, as someone who shares in common certain social and ethnic realities with other slaves on the plantation.  He embodies the stereotype Slave, the iron jockey figure that used to appear on so many Southern lawns. In fact, he seems to run the plantation on an equal basis with his owner.  When he recognizes that Django and his wife Broomhilda know each other, he summons Calvin into another room and informs him, speaking without dialect, sipping on a bourbon and sitting in a comfortable chair, in the iconography of the patriarch.  The racist type that he embodies is a conscious and voluntary identity he assumes for himself.

Even though the film attacks slavery and racism, it certainly uses racist stereotypes.  Stephen is an example.  The first time Schultz gives Django the chance to choose clothing, he dresses up like little Boy Blue.  Django’s wife is named Broomhilda.  Django loves to kill white people.  And of course the whites are stereotyped as well—no graduations of moral virtue at all.  It’s beyond Calvin Candie’s range to be anything other than the stereotyped slave owner that he is. 

The film’s final violent scene of retribution towards which everything has moved reminded me of any number of video games that allow the player to slaughter hordes of evildoers.  It reminded me of similar scenes in numerous films of the last fifty years, including many of the films that Tarantino is emulating here.  And it reminded me of nothing so much as the school house in Connecticut where a deranged killer with an automatic weapon slaughtered 20 little children.  Is there a connection—between the video games, the movie violence, and the savagely slaughtered children?