jessica lange

Cape Fear (1991)

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As the final moments of Cape Fear came to a close with a zoom-in on Juliette Lewis’s eyes and a half-heartedly delivered epilogue about how she and her family never spoke about what happened with Max Cady with one another, I turned to my viewing companion and asked, “Wait, was this a bad movie?” to which he replied “I think it might have been.” But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

It came up months ago in a discussion about Goodfellas in the opening segment of our podcast episode about Nowhere, but I have a pretty big Martin Scorsese gap in my film knowledge. Until this year, I thought I had seen only one of his films, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (which was discussed in the opening segment of our podcast episode about Richard III), although further review of his filmography revealed that I had also seen two movies that I didn’t realize were his: the concert film The Last Waltz and Shutter Island, neither of which I initially connect to him because, in the case of the former, it’s not very much like his primary body of work, and in the case of the latter, it wasn’t a very good movie. Since then, I’ve also seen Casino (discussed in our Junk Head episode) and Taxi Driver (discussed in our Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie episode), and now we can add Cape Fear to the list, although I had kind of already seen it given that it forms the basis of the Simpsons episode “Cape Feare,” which I would conservatively estimate that I have seen one hundred times. 

A remake of the 1962 film directed by J. Lee Thompson starring Gregory Peck as a lawyer stalked and harassed by a recently released felon played by Robert Mitchum, Scorsese’s Cape Fear casts Nick Nolte as Sam Bowden, a former Atlanta public defender now living in North Carolina. His wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) is a graphic designer and their daughter Danielle (Lewis) is a high school student whom they have enrolled in summer school to punish her for smoking pot. Bowden is also carrying on an emotional (but not physical—yet) affair with a county clerk employee named Lori (Ileana Douglas). It isn’t his flirtation with infidelity that turns his life upside down, however, but the release of Max Cady (Robert De Niro), a man Sam dismissively refers to as a “Pentecostal hillbilly,” the scion of a family of snake-handling whom Sam unsuccessfully defended against a charge of aggravated rape of a sixteen-year-old girl. During the trial, Sam followed his personal ethics while simultaneously committing dereliction of his duty as Cady’s appointed advocate by burying evidence that Cady’s victim was characterized as “promiscuous,” which would have allowed Cady to argue down to a lesser sentence. Sam assumed that this would never come to light since Cady was illiterate, but in the fourteen years that he spent in prison, Cady has not only learned to read but has studied philosophy, theology, and the law. Using his new knowledge, Cady sets about tormenting the Bowden family while always remaining just within the allowance of legal statutes and using Sam’s defensiveness and hot temper against him by goading him into starting altercations. When Cady assaults Lori after taking her home from a bar because he knows that she, with her knowledge of how her sexual and personal history will be dragged out in front of a courtroom full of her co-workers, will refuse to press charges, things take a turn for the violent, and things get worse for the Bowdens and their allies from there. 

It’s impossible to talk about this film in 2025 without taking it into consideration with the indelible pop cultural impression that its Simpsons adaptation left on the greater consciousness. “Marge on the Lam” will never be more famous than Thelma & Louise; “Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(d’oh)cious” will never be better remembered than Mary Poppins; and “Rosebud” will never touch the widespread cultural importance of Citizen Kane. But Cape Fear? It may be less famous than “Cape Feare.” It doesn’t hurt that it’s widely considered one of the series’ best episodes, usually appearing in various top ten lists, and it’s a personal favorite of mine. When it comes to Sideshow Bob episodes, I think that I would give the edge to “Sideshow Bob Roberts” by just a hair because of that installment’s biting political edge, but “Cape Feare” is the funniest by a wide margin. Even if you’re someone who’s never seen the show, the omnipresence of memes that originate from it mean that it’s given us some of the longest lasting Simpsons jokes and images, like Homer’s extreme stupidity rendering him unable to respond to the name of his witness protection identity, Homer’s frightening offer of brownies and brandishing of a chainsaw on the “Thompson” family’s houseboat, and, of course, Bob and the rakes. It’s with this in mind that I offer the possibility that this movie was not intended to be as comedic as I found it, which contributed to a feeling of overall tonal whiplash and inconsistency that made it a strange text to interact with. That, combined with some experimental filmmaking choices that range from the interesting to the absurd, make for a film that is overall less than the sum of its parts. 

Despite the main conflict of the film happening between Nolte’s Sam and De Niro’s Cady, the most powerful scenes in this film are those that feature the film’s talented roster of actresses acting against one of them. Cady’s semi-seduction of Danielle by calling her the night before summer school starts to pose as her new drama teacher and direct her to the theatre in the film’s basement for “class” the next day, where he preys upon the fifteen-year-old’s desire to be treated more maturely, is skin-crawling, and Lewis plays Danielle perfectly in this scene —  disturbed but intrigued, flattered in spite of herself, and frighteningly naive. Lange gets two big scenes. While her big monologue in the finale, in which she attempts to redirect Cady’s imminent sexual violence against Danielle back onto herself by flattering him and lying about an emotional connection, is quite good, it’s the earlier scene in which she accuses Sam of sleeping with Lori after hearing him sounding overly concerned on the phone that is her powerhouse moment. She’s a tornado of fury, and it’s fantastic to witness. In Ileana Douglas’s penultimate scene, Sam comes to her in the hospital after Cady has beaten and sexually assaulted her, and we get our first glimpse of just how dangerous and vile a man Cady is; Lori has been brutalized. Douglas gives what may be a career-best performance delivering a harrowing monologue about what it’s like to be a woman who’s witnessed the justice system act as a secondary violating entity in the way that it forces the events to be revisited and picked over, examined and re-examined and cross-examined, and how often justice fails to be served in spite of all of it. 

It’s a gut-punch of a scene (genuinely the film’s greatest), one that’s immediately followed by one in which the furious Sam demands takes his anger out verbally upon sympathetic police lieutenant Elgart (Robert Mitchum, who previously portrayed Cady in 1962), who ends the scene with the uproariously funny line “Well, pardon me all over the place.” He’s not the only returning actor from the earlier film to appear in a scene that borders on camp in tone, either, as Peck portrays Lee Heller, an attorney that Cady engages to file a restraining order against Sam when Sam’s private investigator Kersek (Joe Don Baker) hires some goons to rough Cady up, in which Cady manages to get the upper hand. Heller appears in court wearing a suit that’s several sizes too big for him while Peck affects a Southern accent, to the effect that he feels like he’s a simple hyper chicken from a backwoods asteroid costumed by David Byrne. Cady himself is an interesting case, as De Niro plays him as a truly terrifying man, driven and determined and focused, with nothing but hatred and revenge in his heart. On the other hand, Cady is a clownish figure, dressing in garish clothing of various bold prints (notably, Cady also continues to wear bellbottoms in several scenes, which would have been the style at the time that he was sentenced in 1977), and his menace is undercut by some of De Niro’s choices to go a little “broad.” Or am I just too Simpsons-pilled? Do I read the scene in which a severely dirtied Cady detaches himself from the bottom of the Bowden’s Jeep Cherokee after they’ve driven out to Cape Fear as campy and funny because I’ve seen Sideshow Bob do it countless times? Am I not supposed to be laughing when Cady finally dies, being dragged beneath the surging waters of Cape Fear when he starts speaking in tongues before singing a hymn about the River Jordan? It feels like I shouldn’t be given that mere moments before this Leigh and Danielle were in harrowing sexual danger, but I also can’t imagine that the film could expect me to take Cady’s dying glossolalia seriously either. “Cape Feare” is in such a rhetorical conversation with Cape Fear that it’s essentially paratext, so I have to consider that I’m biased not to take the film’s drama seriously, but I also don’t think that the shadow of “Cape Feare” is entirely to blame for a Cape Fear’s tonal failings either. 

One of the things that is most praiseworthy in the film is the moral dilemma that it posits. Sam unequivocally betrayed his oath and broke the law by suppressing evidence that would have reduced Cady’s sentence; there’s no argument about that. But Cady had already bragged to him about beating two previous aggravated sexual assault charges and when Sam witnessed the extent of his brutality toward his teenaged victim, he made what is a reasonable moral and ethical choice to ensure that Cady could not continue his reign of terror. Justice failed, and justice was served. This is ultimately what Cady discovered and what set him off on his violent revenge campaign, and it turns out that Sam did it all in vain, anyway. Cady insists he would have served the seven years he would have gotten with his reduced charges and considered it just, but by the time he had spent that amount of time incarcerated, he had already murdered another inmate and made it look like an accident. This open secret meant that the parole board never even considered his early release. If Sam hadn’t hidden the “exonerating” evidence, Cady would still have served the same amount of time. Violence simply begets; that’s its nature. If the film had spent a little bit more time on this topic, I think it might have been able to pull these disparate threads together, but it never really comes to the forefront. As it is, this one is composed of some great elements, but they don’t work together. You can’t take it as seriously as it sometimes demands because it’s a little too campy in certain places, but you can’t take it as a fully straightforward campy thriller-comedy not because it’s often too frightening but because the omnipresent threat of sexual violence makes it too dark to comfortably enjoy on that level. Less worthy as a whole than the combined value of its individual parts.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Broken Flowers (2005)

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In my Silver City review, I mentioned my recent writing retreat, in which I went internet-free in a cabin for a week to get some fiction writing done, and the collection of “Blockbuster’s Twilight Years”-era DVDs that had been purchased during that organization’s decline and which found there way to the cabin. One of these films was Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 Bill Murray vehicle Broken Flowers. I have a complete and utter Jarmusch blind spot, never having seen any of his films. In fact, I only know him from his appearance on Fishing with John for, as you well know by now dear reader, I am a weirdo. After the abysmal experience of watching In Secret and once again trying and failing to get through Titus, I really wanted to clear my Jessica Lange palate, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Don Johnston (Bill Murray) is a serial womanizer, now retired after having done quite well in the field of “computers,” and living rather disaffectedly. When his latest ladyfriend Sherry (Julie Delpy) leaves him, citing that she feels like his mistress even though he isn’t married, he receives a second blow: an untraceable letter from a woman claiming that Don fathered a now nineteen-year-old son with her and she kept it from him. The letter’s author warns that the boy is now on a road trip, and she has her suspicions that he’s looking for his father, and doesn’t want Don to be taken completely unaware. At the urging of his neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), Don travels to see the five women who might have sent the letter.

First up is Laura (Sharon Stone), who married a now-dead stock car racer. Now a professional closet organizer, she does have a teenaged child—a daughter inexplicably named Lolita, who even more inexplicably expresses a sexual interest in 55-year-old Don. Next up is Dora (Frances Conroy), formerly a flower child but now leading a boring existence as the wife and business partner of real estate agent Ron (Christopher McDonald). Then it’s on to Dr. Carmen Markowski (Jessica Lange), who Don remembers as being very passionate about becoming a lawyer, but who is now some kind of animal whisperer, and from there Don locates Penny (Tilda Swinton), living in a bleak, crumbling clapboard farmhouse somewhere that definitely has a meth problem. Finally, Don visits the grave of Michelle, the fifth and final potential author of the letter. Returning home, he notices a young man (Mark Webber) whom he seems to remember having run into before, and buys him a sandwich and a coffee. Assuming that the boy is the long-lost son whose arrival was foretold, Don starts talking about being the kid’s father, freaking him out and causing him to run off. Alone in the street, Don watches as a car drives by slowly as a teenaged boy (Homer Murray, Bill’s real life son) makes eye contact with Don from the passenger seat, and then is gone.

While definitely a product of a certain time and of a certain generation of masculinity, which detracted from the end product for me, this was a good watch overall. The idea of Don Johnston as a Don Juan-esque lothario is a bit of a stretch (no offense to Murray, but let’s get real) and the fact that the film hinges on not just his one-time sexual voracity in his peak, but also his virility and that he’s never changed his behavior, is the weakest element. Murray’s also doing none of the heavy lifting here, as the editing is doing nearly all of the work while Murray sits back and lets his motionless silence be captured by Jarmusch’s directorial eye. There’s a great performance in here from the male lead, but it’s all in the Kuleshov of it all, while Murray does that thing that he always does (hey—if it’s not broke).

Looking at Jarmusch’s larger filmography, it seems his earlier films that predate Broken Flowers were largely anthological works, while his more recent ones seem to be more standard in their narrative structure, and this film is a kind of bridge between those two forms, conceptually, as it follows Don through a series of vignettes that consist of reunions with the women he once loved, each one shorter than the last, beginning with an overnight with Laura, a dinner with Dora and her husband, a constantly-interrupted period between appointments with Carmen, a four or five sentence exchange with Penny, and finally no time at all with Michelle. This adherence to structure is something that I love in any work of art; I think that the attention to detail is something that soothes my hyperactive brain. There’s also a lot of fun with the minor details of each interaction: Laura’s daughter’s detachment from the death of her father (“It was on the TV”), the utter sterility and banality of Dora’s bland dinner (a big slab of meat, unseasoned white rice, and crinkle cut carrots, possibly boiled), and the dilapidation of Penny’s home. There’s also something fascinating about the high number of basketball hoops everywhere he goes, which Don always instantly assumes means that there’s a teenage boy about and that he’s come to the right place, and yet their omnipresence renders them completely irrelevant as a clue.

Before Don goes on his adventure, Winston primes him to be on the lookout for pink items and objects to match the pink paper on which the letter was typed, and to try and obtain writing samples to compare to the written address on the envelope, which is the only handwriting on the letter. Although he isn’t successful in the latter endeavor, he (and by extension the viewer) is drawn to pink items everywhere in his adventure: Penny’s boots and motorcycle, Dora’s business card (to match her husband’s blue one), Carmen’s pants, etc. It’s a nice touch that, like the basketball hoops that appear so frequently, all of these clues are meaningless as well. The film sets itself up as a mystery: who sent the letter? And in the end, that mystery isn’t important, and remains unsolved. Each woman with whom he reunites is utterly noncommittal in their responses to Don’s roundabout questions, and in the end, it’s not as if he could have expected something different: if any one of them had taken the time to send Don a letter without divulging their identity, then they wouldn’t really allow themselves to be taken by surprise as he intends and suddenly confess when confronted in person. The possibility is even floated that Sherry wrote the letter as an attempt to shake Don out of his comfort zone, and that’s a possibility, but that resolution doesn’t really matter in the end.

As a showcase for the women who round out this cast, including Chloë Sevigny as Carmen’s assistant and Pell James as Sun Green, a compassionate florist who tends to the wounds that Don received from Penny’s friends, this is a pretty nice vehicle. It’s a film with a lot of breathing room but no real fat to be trimmed, playing out in shots that are long enough to convey meaning and last not one moment more. The blipvert/fever dreams that Don has in his quiet moments were initially distracting, especially as they simply once more reminded viewers that Don is still a perfectly virile man capable of sexual thought, which errs a little too close to the “New Yorker story in which an aging professional lusts after his student/protege” genre for my personal tastes, but not enough to derail the whole shebang.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

In Secret (2013)

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I wrote before about the recent shuttering of both Vulcan Video and I Luv Video, and how neither one managed to survive the consequences of prolonged COVID-related shutdowns. In truth, both have been struggling for a while. When I was still living in Louisiana and only visiting Austin, there was a Vulcan Video location in North Austin near UT’s campus, complete with a giant mural of Spock, one block south from the apartment building where I would ultimately get my first place in Austin. One block west was the second location for I Luv Video on Guadalupe. By the end of my first year of residence, Vulcan had relocated their North location by about 25 blocks, and the I Luv Video on Guad posted a bunch of their DVDs and memorabilia for sale and consolidated with the main location on Airport Boulevard. It was at this sale that I found the Mrs. Winterbourne press packet that I wrote about when that was our Movie of the Month, lo these many years ago now. Most of the good horror had already been picked over, and what remained was risky. Jessica Lange had just left American Horror Story and I was hankering for some of that good Lange content when I stumbled across the DVD for In Secret, which featured her prominently on the cover. It was a fairly recent release (2013), too, and I figured I could risk the $4 and see if it would soothe my jonesing. But then, as these things often happen, I had to move and the DVD got stuffed into a box, and then put on a shelf for three years where it was occasionally discussed and then rejected as I could never quite sell my roommate on it. And then it went into another box, and then onto another shelf in another new place, where it’s sat for another year, until it took a trip with me to a cottage in the Texas Hill Country as part of my “emergency media” stash for my wi-fi free solo writing retreat (it’s going great, by the way). I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t live up to the hype. Spoiler alert for an Emile Zola novel that’s older than harnessed electricity.

In Secret is the very rote 19th century story of Thérèse, a young girl whose mother dies and leaves her in the care of her indigent explorer father, who immediately deposits the child with his own sister, Madame Raquin (Jessica Lange) and her chronically ill, possibly hypochondriac son Camille. Raquin is no wicked aunt/stepmother, but while she lacks ill intentions, she has an abundance of ideas of propriety and the natural progress of a life that are rigid in both structure and enforcement. In time, Thérèse grows up to be Elizabeth Olsen, and Camille grows up to be Tom Felton, and all the while the two are still forced to sleep in the same bed. When word arrives that Thérèse’s father, who has been gone for what must be at least eight years but feels like more, has died, Madame Raquin wastes no time in marrying the cousins to each other, which was the style at the time. She secures a job for Camille in Paris doing some kind of office work, and she opens a dress shop in a dingy alley with Thérèse as her assistant. Camille is soon reunited with Laurent (Oscar Isaacs), a childhood friend whose family relocated before Thérèse came to live with the Raquins, and his vivaciousness and bohemian nature capture Thérèse’s fancy, as her life is otherwise completely passionless and dictated by her aunt/mother-in-law.

The two soon begin a sordid, torrid affair, but when Camille decides to move the family back to their country home, their desperation to stay together pushes Thérèse and Laurent to kill Camille so that they can stay together in the city. While on a day trip in the park that culminates in renting a boat, they push him overboard before sinking the boat and framing the whole thing as an accident. While waiting what seems an appropriate amount of time before marrying one another, Laurent and Thérèse grow bitter and resentful of one another, and even after they have married, this hatred for one another continues to grow, especially once Madame Raquin suffers a stroke that leaves her largely paralyzed and requiring constant care, until they both seek desperate measures to extricate themselves from the circumstances.

This movie is … not very good. You know how, sometimes, you see that a movie was filmed in Serbia, and you’re like, “Oh, this movie was made specifically so that they would have something to show on buses for people traveling across Eastern Europe”? This is one of those films. This is, to date, the only feature helmed by director Charlie Stratton, who looks to have come up through the Hollywood ranks as an actor first, with sporadic one-off roles in TV series like L.A. Law, Thirtysomething, Dallas, and Matlock, with a major role on the Dirty Dancing television show, which apparently existed. From there, he’s mostly directed for television sporadically (Revenge, The Fosters, Chasing Life, Everwood), but the problem here isn’t one of direction (it’s competent), it’s one of story. This is a very 19th Century story, and it feels like it.

Certain narratives of that age can be endlessly reinvented or reinterpreted (say Bronte, Austen, Alcott), and this is a story penned by Émile Zola, who was nominated for both the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote it with the intent of examining the relationships between the four temperaments, with each of the characters representing one of them, and as such considered the narrative itself to be a foregone conclusion, as this was the only way the four archetypes could interact, and the tragic ending was a foregone conclusion. That’s fine for the era in which it was written and is even fine if one were to engage with that worldview/mindset and re-examine and reinvent the narrative. There’s nothing inventive or novel about this extremely faithful approach, and as such, it feels more like an outdated morality play than anything else. One may as well make a completely straightforward adaptation of Pamela if one isn’t going to engage with the text in a meaningful, transformative, inspective way.

Most contemporary criticism revolved around Lange’s performance, and she delivers a great one, as usual, as she wrings great drama out of the scenes in which she is trapped in her body and attempting to communicate to others that all is not as it seems. Felton is serviceable, and Olsen and Issacs deliver characteristically invested performances as well, but there’s only so much overwrought peak-Romanticism era histrionics that one can stand. The film’s more somber moments are undercut by an air of (one hopes) unintentional comedy, delivered mostly by the presence and performances of Matt Lucas, then best known for Little Britain, and Shirley Henderson as, respectively, Olivier and his wife Suzanne. Above and beyond the fact that no one, from Lange down, even attempted to portray a hint of Franconess in this very French story, these two Brits seem to be playing every scene in which they appear for humor, and although it’s tonally jarring, these few morsels manage to be the only moments of real entertainment that the film has. The scene in which Lange’s Raquin painfully attempts to tell her assembled friends that Laurent and Thérèse killed Camille by painstakingly drawing individual letters with her enfeebled hand, only to get out “Thérèse and Laurent” before exhausting herself, only for Olivier to declare that she must have been writing “Thérèse and Laurent are taking great care of me,” is camp of the highest order, and completely out of place in what is otherwise a dour and dreary film.

Matt Lucas should never be the saving grace of anything.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond