De Niro: A Life (61 page)

His application didn’t stop with his physique, of course. He dedicated himself to a deep exploration of prison psychology, criminal insanity, and sociopathy, visiting and talking to convicts and mental patients who were suggested to him as subjects, reading books and medical articles about serial killers, rape, revenge, and torture, exploring the writings of Karen Horney, Frederick Nietzsche, and even Dante for their ideas about vindictiveness. He read up on prison life (especially the phenomenon of prison rape) and on legal ethics; he studied the Messiah complex, Pentecostal fundamentalism, revival meetings, snake handling, and speaking in tongues. He watched Barbara Koeppel’s Oscar-winning documentary
Harlan
County USA and some episodes of Charles Kuralt’s TV work (suggested to him by Jane Rosenthal) for the accents, Charles Laughton’s baroque thriller
Night of the Hunter
for the dark themes, and his own work, especially
Taxi Driver
,
Bang the Drum Slowly
,
Jackknife
, and
Raging Bull
, to find things that he’d already done that might be of use. He made notes in a copy of the script of the first
Cape Fear
and, as they were prepared and sent to him, on Scorsese’s storyboards for various scenes. He spent $5,000 on getting his teeth to look unhealthy (and then, after shooting, another $20,000 to have them restored to their usual luster). And he sat patiently for hours of makeup tests to help design his look for various moments in the film when Cady would be disfigured by the Bowdens, by police, or by other parties.

He was especially taken with the religious aspect of Cady’s obsessions. He bought a Bible concordance and consulted it for ideas about revenge. He studied jailhouse tattoos and spent a lot of time and money designing the array of body art that Cady would wear, searching for just the right Bible verses, images and themes to convey the man’s righteous, if twisted, fury.
^*1
“
He was constantly looking to embellish his character with biblical quotations,” Strick recalled. “Every scene of Bob’s he would call me and say, ‘Can Max say something
else here about vengeance, from the Bible?’ ” And when he had his scenes written to his liking, he had a researcher bring them to convicts and ask them to read them aloud for a video camera so he could study how they spoke and behaved. “
He’s incessant,” De Niro later said about Cady. “He just keeps coming and coming.… He’s like the Alien or the Terminator.” Indeed, so was De Niro: his preparation for Max Cady was as thoroughgoing as any work he’d ever done.

The film was shot throughout Florida from November 1990 until March of the following year. There was a hiccup at the end of December, when the actor originally cast as the private eye hired to protect the family showed up on the set, changed his mind about being in the film, and left, with Scorsese and the producers chasing after him; he was replaced within days by Joe Don Baker.

But there were happy accidents, too, such as Juliette Lewis, who was powerful and evocative in her scenes with De Niro. Scorsese was worried that she might be too green to stand on her own, so he used two cameras in the harrowing one-on-one scene between the two so as not to miss anything good she happened to do. He got gold. “
Bob brought Juliette right up to his level,” Strick said. “I remember Marty told me after he shot it that there was such an embarrassment of good footage that he was almost considering dividing the screen in half and just running both of them the whole time.”

B
EFORE
M
AX
C
ADY
, Scorsese and De Niro had created several characters whose descents into evil were strains of self-hate and whose sociopathy was a means to redemption. Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, and even Rupert Pupkin were, in a substantial sense, vehicles in which Scorsese expressed a sense of himself as a soul-tormented sinner seeking to reclaim his humanity through some form of violence or, at least, desperate behavior. The audience might not see itself reflected in these characters, but their paths, however singular and disturbing, were somehow plausible, emblematic, illustrative.

Max Cady is none of those things. He was purely and simply born evil, has lived evilly, and looks certain to die in some sort of evil holocaust. His obsession with Sam Bowden has a strain of justice in it; the
lawyer truly did violate his professional creed in failing to defend Cady fully. But granting that Cady deserved a better lawyer, he also deserved to be punished. He is irredeemably vicious, base, and heartless, more so than any character De Niro had ever played (excepting, of course,
Angel Heart
’s Louis Cyphre—and even then it’s kind of a close call).

De Niro makes a magnificent show of him, creating a grand and broad and grotesque and oversized character. De Niro’s work on his accent, tattoos, reading habits, wardrobe, and especially physique marked his deepest commitment to a role in years, and in some ways Cady synthesizes much of De Niro’s career until this point: the bodily transformation, the carefully constructed dialect, the methodical creation of a backstory (De Niro helped select the images taped to the wall of Cady’s cell, which included Satan, Robert E. Lee, Dwight Eisenhower, and Alexander the Great). But he is well beyond anything De Niro has ever tried, almost inhuman, truly, in the vein of the Terminator or Freddy Krueger. With Scorsese, De Niro had created a powerful gallery of men at war with their demons; now he became those demons—all of them—with a rock-hard body, a bankroll, and an unquenchable desire to have every sort of vengeance he can.

Cady has a style—a kind of demented 1950s hepcat with slick hair, aloha shirts, a polished old convertible, and a cigar lighter decorated with a pair of boobs. He has mastered a sufficiently housebroken discourse to speak with civil clarity with legal authorities, to pick up Sam’s (tipsy) mistress in a bar, to convince (naive) Dani that he’s a faculty member at her high school. He has sufficient cheek to provoke incidents and sufficient smarts to turn the antagonistic actions of those he’s goaded to his advantage. He’s handsome, in a rugged, corn-pone way. And he’s charming, serpent that he is. (In a brilliant bit of costume design, he’s wearing a Lacoste cardigan with the iconic open-mouthed crocodile on it during the sequence in which he seduces Dani.)

But there are aspects of him that are so outré and outlandish as to make it seem that he doesn’t exist at all, at least not on the same existential level as the rest of us: his insane, guttural laugh as he sits in the audience appreciating the knockabout comedy
Problem Child
(more specifically, a scene of John Ritter parodying Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
); his almost unnaturally taut and fat-free physique; his
madman’s tattoos; his appalling act of near-cannibalism as he prepares to beat and rape Sam’s mistress; his diabolical scheme of increasingly cruel and intimate reprisals; his superhuman—indeed, literally monstrous, in terms of genre—physical resilience.
^*2

The character is drawn in broad, almost cartoonish strokes: the tattoos (“I don’t know whether to look at him or read him,” scoffs Robert Mitchum as a cop witnessing Cady’s full-body frisking); the ornate language and quotations; the astonishing shot that begins with Cady hanging upside down from a chinning bar while talking to Dani on the phone and then pivots so that the camera is upside down and Cady, twisted grin, hair standing on end and all, seems right-side up; the can’t-be-killed indomitability in the final act; the speaking in tongues. This isn’t a person; this is a living vision of movie evil, a creature from the black lagoon of the human soul.

And De Niro is exquisite in almost every single bit of it: the drawl, resurrected from his early films; the varied uses of his body; the black, black comedy; the fearlessness and immediacy and commitment; the forays into exotica; the absolute lack of movie star vanity. It’s impossible to imagine Pacino, Hoffman, Hackman, or even Nicholson doing what De Niro does here: at nearly fifty years of age, with a cushy position in the movie business, he is ripped, ferocious, defiantly dislikeable, and frightening. There are aspects of
Cape Fear
that make it something of an art-house horror movie, a film of trip wires, sharp edges, and hurtful humor. And the most indelible of these is De Niro’s performance, as large and as fully realized as any in his career and dedicated to the embodiment of vengeance, cruel irony, and hate. It’s despicable. And it’s delicious.

Almost inevitably, a De Niro–Scorsese project brought out the scold and moralist in critics.
Cape Fear
was admired but kept at arm’s length by the likes of Stanley Kauffmann in the
New Republic
; calling the film “conventional fare,” he backhandedly complimented its star, saying, “It’s the kind of part that, for any actor of talent, let alone De Niro’s talent, almost acts itself.” In the
New Yorker
, Terrence Rafferty
declared, “De Niro’s frenetic but thoroughly uninteresting performance is emblematic of the movie’s inadequacy.” But Vincent Canby in the
New York Times
was full of praise for De Niro and Juliette Lewis, citing them for “two of the year’s most accomplished performances,” and Desson Thomson in the
Washington Post
declared De Niro’s work “sterling.”

If the material was brutally strong beer, it didn’t turn away movie audiences. Opening at number one with a $10 million weekend, it went on to earn $79 million domestically and another $103 million abroad—easily the highest-grossing film that either De Niro or Scorsese had ever made. In many ways, they had confronted a darkness beyond any they’d ever contemplated, but the audience had somehow caught up to them and, indeed, may have gone further than they had dared.

And it wasn’t only audiences who found merit in the film.
Cape Fear
was nobody’s idea of a warm or noble movie, but it was obviously made—and especially acted—with great skill. When year-end award season arrived, De Niro and Lewis were cited by multiple critics’ organizations for their remarkable work. And when nominations for the biggest awards, the Oscars, were announced, both were included in the mix: De Niro in the Best Actor category, Lewis as Best Supporting Actress. The horrifically caustic material might have seemed well beyond the tolerance of Oscar voters, who only the year before had passed up the opportunity to grant prizes to
Goodfellas
in favor of
Dances with Wolves.
But
Cape Fear
wasn’t even the most grisly picture in the Oscar race in the spring of 1992. That honor would go to the film that dominated the awards by becoming only the second movie in history to win Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay:
The Silence of the Lambs
. Maybe if Max Cady had chosen to swallow the chunk he’d bitten out of his rape victim’s face rather than spit it out, De Niro’s name would have been in the envelope instead of Anthony Hopkins’s.

I
N 1991
, T
RIBECA
P
RODUCTIONS FINALLY PUT ITS FIRST PROJECTS
into production, almost simultaneously. One didn’t involve De Niro directly—
Thunderheart
, a thriller about an FBI agent of Native American heritage (Val Kilmer) forced to grapple with his ethnic identity during the investigation of a murder on a Sioux reservation. De Niro had paid careful attention to the script development, annotating memos from TriStar Pictures, which was funding production and distribution, and telling the film’s director, the Englishman Michael Apted, that the studio was correct in its assessment of the problems in the screenplay. “
You’re wrong,” he wrote to Apted, “nothing works.” The film shot on locations in South Dakota through the spring and summer of 1991, TriStar spending more than $17 million to make it and slightly more than that again to release it. It grossed less than $23 million at the box office when it was finally released to lukewarm reviews in April 1992.

By then, Tribeca’s second production was in the can but not in the distribution pipeline.
Mistress
was the pet project of Barry Primus, a New York actor who’d been friendly with De Niro and Scorsese for years and had appeared in a key role in
New York, New York.
Primus, along with
Pretty Woman
screenwriter J. F. Lawton, had written a semiautobiographical script that satirized Hollywood, the story of a director so willing to find funding for an independent film that he promises key roles in the production to the girlfriends of various potential financiers, leading to a series of farcical misunderstandings and errors that threaten the viability of the movie and, potentially, the well-being of the director himself. In the mid-1980s, Primus showed the script to
De Niro, who expressed appreciation for it and even agreed to shepherd it in a fashion, bringing it to people who he thought might be interested in producing it. “
I’m going to show this to people,” De Niro told Primus, according to Primus. “[De Niro] would take it around. He would have a meeting, and he’d say, ‘By the way, here’s another movie somebody should make someday. I don’t necessarily want to be in it. I’m not in the producing game, but maybe you’ll do it.’ ” But nobody was interested. A few years later, Primus was still bemoaning his bum luck when he heard something promising from his old friend: “
One day I was walking down Broadway with Bobby and he said, ‘I’m going to start this company in a couple of years, and if you still haven’t gotten this movie made, I’ll do it.’ ”