Hoop tober No. 10 #37

I take myself too seriously. But you know, the damn thing is, you gotta be serious about making a picture. — Martin Scorsese

Adding this to my Hooptober list was a bit of wishful thinking. It's a truly poignant detail to me that Scorsese, whose love for horror films is truly robust, hasn't made a horror movie himself. That is, he has made films shot through with incredible Gothic vibes (e.g. Shutter Island), but not a film that could actually get out on the dance floor and boogie with the rest of the genre. It seems churlish to complain about this when Scorsese has given us movies with such dark and intense energy that they nearly function as horror films. At any rate, based on details I'd picked up here and there, it seemed possible to me that Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear was as close as I was going to get to my fond wish.

In terms of the raw details of the plot, Cape Fear doesn't fit particularly well into the patterns of American horror films. It has a lot more kinship with the stories that proliferated in the late 1980s about a menacing individual terrorizing the nice nuclear American family (following Fatal Attraction). But the screenplay by Wesley Strick subverts that whole structure by emphasizing the nasty implicit in the nice nuclear family. Nolte's Sam Bowden is helpless in the face of the threat that Max Cady represents — his helplessness isn't merely logistical, although that part of the story is still compelling, it's moral and spiritual, and as the camera squeezes in on the sweaty desperation in Nolte's face, it might as well be a close-up of maggots wriggling inside a walking corpse.

While the details of the plot read like a tidy thriller, in terms of tone and style, Scorsese has cranked up the intensity so the result feels like a reactor ready to melt down. The vibes go beyond Hitchcock (although using Herrmann's original score gets him a good way there). beyond even DePalma on a Hitchcock kick (although he matches that energy too with the frenzied quality of the camera work)... you feel every inch of Scorsese's love for perverted Mario Bava chillers and the exoticism of the Southern Gothic for a jittery NYC kid ("The South has a fine tradition of savoring fear," as Joe Don Baker's Kersek puts it). The result is compelling, but not as audience-friendly as something like The Departed. There's something discomfiting and not for the squeamish about it. Nothing captures this feeling more than the excruciating scene where DeNiro's Cady tries to worm his way past the nascent defenses of Juliette Lewis's teenaged Danielle.

For better and for worse, Scorsese means business here. He's wearing his Catholic conscience on his sleeve, he doesn't just want to take the audience on a fun ride, he wants to delve into the convoluted patterns of evil and accountability for evil. That puts some of the burden of the film's success back on its dialogue. It feels strange to say this, because of all the enormous talents at work in the film, but Strick's contributions are enormous. The movie is framed as a series of escalating confrontations, mostly verbal, and Strick has given the cast a lot of chewy dialogue to work with. I admire DeNiro's gonzo energy in this, but he looks as absurd as often as he looks intimidating. But when he speaks, the chuckles tend to die in my throat. Strick deserves his laurels for that.