Cape Fear (2001, DVD)

What sounds like (and, in all fairness, is) nothing more than a routine stalker film about an ex-convict (Robert DeNiro) who goes after his old attorney (Nick Nolte), his wife (Jessica Lange), and his daughter (Juliette Lewis), is brought to a much higher level by the ingenuity of the direction and the performances of what has to be one of the most impressive ensembles of the nineties.

There are certain things that you go in expecting in a movie like this. You want the tensions between the once perfectly stable family to rise. You want scenes where the villain ever so playfully teases his prey. You want the ending when the villain holds the poor mother and daughter hostage leaving the heroic father to save the day. This, essentially, is what you get is Marty Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear... but not quite.

Because, you see, the family was never all that stable to begin with, and while the villain here is quite the villain with little to no redeemable qualities, there aren't too many good qualities to find in the so-called "hero" either. It's a stroke of genius from the screenwriters to let us know that the stalker here is not necesarilly stalking the sweet and innocent, but is instead stalking a family whose problems are not created, but rather enlarged and magnified by this lethal threat.

There are times when Cape Fear reaches beyond the horror movie genre that seems to imprison it. There are a few scenes, in fact, in which Scorsese seems to be moments away from creating a masterpiece not of fear, but of all American familial dysfunction. Other themes about loyalty and honor and dignity are brought up (after all, DeNiro wouldn't be stalking Nolte if he had prepared and adequate defense), but they seem much too contrived to be what a director as brilliant as Martine Scorsese is aiming for. They're plot devices designed to keep the story afloat while the film picks apart what it's really interested in.

And not a better group of actors could possibly have been assembled. Nick Nolte burns with a rage that, we sense, is directed more towards his own unfaithfulness and inadequacy than at the man who threatens him. Jessica Lange, at first, struck me as the shriek-and-hide character but shows more depth and repressed sexuality in a scene in which she, thinking she's alone, tries on some lipstick, only to quickly wipe it away. That's the emotional suppression of the American Dream right there.

But the movie belongs to only two actors, who both deliver Oscar caliber performances in roles that wouldn't have been nearly as complex had it not been for their talent. First, of course, in DeNiro who snarls and glares and roars with all the intensity of a bull circling and sizing up his prey. And Juliette Lewis, as the neglected daughter, steals almost every one of her scenes with her shy playfullness. She's the ultimate observer to all the madness that surrounds her, and, in that madness, develops a unique bond with DeNiro's lazy eyed psycho.

The best scene in Cape Fear occurs about halfway through and is shared between Lewis and DeNiro. You see, Juliette Lewis goes into school and wanders into an empty auditorium, where the DeNiro character (posing as her drama teacher) is waiting. They talk, they wink, the lean closer, and even after Lewis discovers the true identity of her so-called drama teacher, she stays to chat and welcomes his advances. It's not a real attraction, mind you, but a way for her to get back at her parents who are the only people that she can blame for the ignorance and the pain that flows through their perfectly decorated house like blood from a freshly slit throat.

Whoa.