7 MARCH 1992, Page 35

Cinema

Cape Fear ('18', Empire Leicester Square)

Dirty deeds

Vanessa Letts

Robert De Niro, as a witty and venge- ful psychopath, gives a great performance in this film, but we are forced to enjoy it quite separately from everything else. He brings exceptional menace and arrogance to the part, and he alone gets away with veering towards camp. Into the original version of the film made in 1962 Martin Scorsese has injected touches of visual self- consciousness and moral ambiguity. Curi- ously enough, though, everything would have been much more terrifying and dis- turbing if he had treated the film as a straightforward shocker. By the time we get to Cape Fear itself and the long-drawn-out conclusion, the film has already shot its bolt and any tension has evaporated for good.

One moment in the film demonstrated how it should have been handled all the way through. Robert De Niro's erstwhile defence attorney (Nick Nolte) discovers a mutilated corpse in the kitchen and shock- ingly and disgustingly slips over on a large slick of blood. In quasi-slapstick fashion, his wife tries to pull him out and falls over too. The audience laughed, but in horror. The film needed more of this kind of grit, filth and realism. Instead we got Jessica Lange, Nick Nolte, hoovered pale-blue car- pets and bland cleanliness. De Niro is the one insanitary presence. He sports a 1970s sailor suit, greasy hair and hideous tattoos CI don't know whether to look at him or read him,' someone says during a strip- search at a police station).

The direction, meanwhile, is distractingly showy. We see rooms, faces and eyes through yellow filters and in negative: visu- al devices which have become almost de rigueur in psychopath films and which are supposed to be intrinsically frightening but aren't. Similarly there are too many refer- ences to Hitchcock — 1950s technicolour skies, spooky film-noir close-ups and kitsch swivelling camera-work — none of which contributes anything at all to the forward momentum of the film.

The music, on the other hand, is a tri- umph of the old over the new. Elmer Bern- stein has adapted the original score, and an orchestra of five dozen strings in the new version makes a huge sound and adds immensely to the mood of the film in the way that a run-of-the-mill modern synthe- siser score almost certainly wouldn't. Bern- stein also has the nous, simple as this may sound, to put the music against the superfi- cial mood of the scenes, a technique that It's from Tarzan.'

has been largely forgotten.

Women in Cape Fear are represented by three stock characters — the attorney's wife, daughter and mistress — all thinly drawn but excellently acted, in particular the daughter, played by Juliette Lewis with great naturalness and frankness as an ingenue teetering on adolescence. The film has been described in America as macho and mysogynistic. But if De Niro's separate sexual relations with the three women appears to be mysogynistic, the audience is nevertheless put in a position of having to question the charisma and attraction for them of this dirty psychopath.

The story is set up as a violent moral les- son for the attorney, who comproinises himself as a lawyer from the start and ends up washing his bloody hands, Macbeth- style, in the murky waters of Cape Fear. The plot's mechanics, however, demand a mass of implausibilities, including two freak wind storms, a joke detective and a ludicrously ineffectual police force. In the- ory the film is discussing the true nature of justice, but the plot requires such unrea- sonable and unlikely behaviour on the part of the characters that any debate on justice in this situation is made pointless. In the end implausibility not only takes Cape Fear out of the moral sphere, but stops it — apart from the sheer force of Robert De Niro's acting — from ever being truly frightening.