‘Cape Fear’ Review: Javier Bardem and Amy Adams Shine in a Series That Keeps Sabotaging Itself

I often find myself wondering, when watching series like Cape Fear, who writes the teenage characters — and why they’re written the way they are. It’s true, up to a point, that adolescent children from troubled families — or families going through difficult situations — can act out in ways that make everything worse, driven by the same insecurity, compulsion, or acting-out impulse that leads them to make, let’s say, some genuinely bad decisions. But building an entire series on the premise that teenagers are easily manipulated, that their sole function is to complicate everything all the time, is outright offensive. And that is the small but fatal problem with Cape Fear — an intense, violent, and at times gripping series that rests its entire narrative weight on the idea that adolescents are, in a word, idiots.

There’s another trick many screenwriters — Nick Antosca included — use to sustain, stretch, and delay conflicts for an extraordinary amount of time: the inability of families to talk about what’s actually happening to them. That can be plausible for a limited stretch (which is why it feels less pronounced in films with a more classical three-act structure), but it becomes unbearable when a family like the Bowdens is on the verge of total dissolution — and I don’t mean divorce, I mean mutilation, imprisonment, and death — and still can’t bring itself to confess or speak honestly with one another about their secrets. How many life-threatening situations does it take before you sit down and tell your partner you were unfaithful, or tell your father you used his gun, or tell your family you drugged them all? And how long is an audience willing to be dragged along by a plot that sustains itself entirely on the whims of writers who needed to stretch what was two hours of film into nine hours of television?

That is the central problem with Cape Fear — a series that has everything it needs to be exceptional, but which, somewhere around the third or fourth episode, begins sliding into a long succession of capricious and implausible situations that make any genuine connection to the story impossible. The series, based on the novel The Executioners — which has already inspired two film adaptations, the most famous directed by Martin Scorsese in 1991 — operates in the heightened, excessive register of fiction that flirts with horror, and that gives it a certain charge, an implicit pact with the viewer that invites a willingness to accept bad decisions and characters who consistently choose the worst available option. But that can’t hold indefinitely, and it can’t be the only narrative tool keeping the conflict alive. The girl who runs toward the house where the monster is waiting can work once in a horror film. Maybe twice. But when she does it over and over again, there’s no conclusion left to draw except that no one could think of another way to put the characters in danger — or that American teenagers have the mental age of five.

This extended bout of frustration comes from the mounting anger I felt while watching Cape Fear. Not discomfort, not unease — anger. Irritation that curdled, eventually, into something close to genuine fury. It started as laughter and ended as exasperation. There’s a magnificent source novel, there’s Scorsese and Steven Spielberg producing, there are two exceptional actors in Amy Adams and Javier Bardem facing off in a psychological war full of ambiguity and moral complexity — and apparently no one could come up with anything better to sustain the conflict than recycling the trope of teenagers resentful of their parents who do nothing but put themselves and everyone else in constant high-stakes jeopardy. Antosca never found another gear across the eight episodes — out of ten — made available to press, and seems to have decided that this would be the engine of the whole story. It nearly wrecks the entire thing.

Outside of this enormous problem, Cape Fear has everything it needs to be compelling. It’s the story of a convict named Max Cady — played by Bardem, unhinged but perfectly calibrated to the show’s visual register — who walks out of prison after new evidence appears to establish that he wasn’t guilty of the crime for which he was convicted (which differs from the one in the film). What the series makes clear from the outset, however, is that this «new evidence» is nothing of the kind: it’s the product of Cady’s talent for manipulating people into doing exactly what he wants. He walks free, and all signs point toward revenge against the two lawyers who sent him to prison — Tom (Patrick Wilson) and Anna Bowden (Adams), who were respectively prosecutor and defense attorney at the original trial, fell in love during the proceedings, and eventually married. What Max believes — not without reason — is that the two of them conspired to have him convicted.

But there is far more buried in that past, far more hidden inside the characters’ histories, than a film could ever have the time to excavate — and the series, unlike the film, can. We learn more about the prior lives of all three principals, all of them considerably troubled; about the births of the Bowdens’ children; about the new life Tom and Anna have built — a life which, from Max’s perspective, was constructed on the foundation of his suffering and his years in prison, years that only made him more violent, following the brutal internal logic of incarceration. But since Anna works for an organization dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted, she is forced to perform a kind of satisfaction about his release, while knowing full well that Max intends to destroy her, her husband, and their two teenage children: the disturbed Zack (Joe Anders) and the initially high-achieving Natalie (Lily Collias).

Once outside, Max Cady will do everything in his power to implode that family. Or so it seems. He presents himself to the world as a reformed man building a new life — becoming something of an online celebrity in the process — while the series gradually reveals how the Bowdens’ existence begins to come apart, piece by piece, without any apparent involvement on his part. Is that the truth? Or is he pulling every string from the shadows? What’s certain is that from that point on, the children grow increasingly confused — not just doubtful of their parents, which would make a certain sense given the secrets being kept from them, but actively turning against them, fueled by social media and ambient rumor, only to feel remorse, only to do it again, and feel remorse again, on and on without end.

Without that narrative engine, and with a few fewer episodes, Cape Fear could have been a very good series. It’s more violent, more perverse, and more genre-inflected than most prestige television; it has a larger-than-life villain who genuinely menaces — Bardem always menaces — and a central couple straining to maintain the facade of the perfect family while concealing, from the world, from their children, and from each other, enough secrets to keep a team of dedicated psychologists busy for years. More than once, in fact, the family attends therapy sessions together — and you can imagine how illuminating those turn out to be.

Juliette Lewis, who has a significant cameo in the series, also let herself be seduced and got her parents into trouble in Scorsese’s 1991 version of the same story — but in the series, that dynamic becomes far more constant, more systematic, and more hollow, to the point of breaking any compact of credibility, even the most generous one. And the problem doesn’t belong to Antosca alone: a great deal of Anglo-American serialized storytelling relies on exactly these kinds of dramatic devices. Perhaps American teenagers really are more foolish or more reckless than one tends to assume — it’s possible — but series like Cape Fear feel almost like a warning against having children, especially when the parents aren’t doing much better themselves.

For two prestigious, highly regarded attorneys, Tom and Anna display a remarkable inability to string together a coherent explanation for their children of what is happening — and what happened. They can’t even discuss it with each other. And it is there, in that spectacular stupidity of the American bourgeoisie, that the real monster lives. Not Max Cady — them. He is only its physical manifestation, the figure who provokes it and sets it on its destructive course. The monster had been living there long before he arrived.