Saw Cape Fear (1991), which finally contains the scene where the bad guy is strapped to the bottom of the family's car and the only reason I watched this movie and the original 1960s version. So, quick recap: the film follows a lawyer who is being menaced by a rapist ex-con. This ex-con is clever and cruel and always just on this side of the law. Driven to further and further desperation, the lawyer finally takes matters into his own hands in a climactic house-boat show down. This one was directed by Scorsese. It was a better film than the 1962 original. It was better in many ways, but also a bit trashier. There are extended torture scenes, in particular which evoke Funny Games's grim audience endurance tests. Anyway, it's an interesting update.
In the original, the lawyer was the one to put him away but in this version, he was the defense council who, horrified by his client's crimes, buried an important piece of evidence. The plot deals very frankly with the interplay between law and justice. In the original, the ex-con drives the lawyer out of the bounds of the law, but this time it's the lawyer's extra-judicial decision which spurs the ex-con into action. Indeed, the lawyer character is weakened greatly by Scorsese. Whereas the original had a happy family, this one is fractious and philandering.
Scorsese is one of those blood-and-guts artists who want to confront us with the violence they think we're all capable of. The villain reasonably argues that the lawyer and he are not so different. They both broke the law, but only he is punished with years in prison. Is that just? The ex-con argues that if he may be judged by a self-appointed god, so too may the lawyer be. This is all very fun and edgy, but I kind of feel like the ex-con is right. If you want vigilantism, you should accept that there are cleverer, crueler people out there. This is not so much a confrontation of a universal inner nature so much as the exploration of one particular, self-reinforcing world-view. The film suggests that the only way out of this cycle of violence is with more violence, but I always wonder what would happen if the lawyer had gotten lunch with the convict, in that opening scene where the convict is introduced. I think the story would have progressed more rapidly if nothing else.
Another update is the treatment of the lawyer's teenage daughter. She is a screaming victim in the original, but here she is ambiguously interested in the rapist and perhaps even his co-conspirator. I believe that she is the latchkey kid - left ignored by her bickering, self-absorbed parents, and left vulnerable to predation. She plasters herself in a cocoon of off-putting rock music videos and rolls her eyes at her father's increasingly frantic efforts to keep her safe. There's a nice microcosm of parental anxieties there which reinforces the whole man-as-beast thing (or young woman as beast, here.)
The film was better in a lot of ways. It wisely makes the villain more philosophically consistent than the hero and plays into Scorsese's interests. The film is sort of necessarily a bit more trashy of course, being made in the 90s and being made by Scorsese. It's tough to confront with bestiality without being a bit repulsive however, so this is on purpose. An interesting pair of films, but I'm glad to be leaving it now.
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