Unreliable Narraratives

Rating: 8/10 (8 August 2019)

The evolution of Martin's career has been fascinating. For most of his movies up until Cape Fear, the camera was literally never more than 3 or 4 feet away from his actors. While he has always demonstrated a flair for moving his camera around, I found the lighting schemes to be pedestrian. He discussed this in an interview around the time Saving Private Ryan came out. He had been on the set visiting Spielberg, the famous scene where the soldiers come up over the hill in silhouette. They had been waiting hours for the sun to reach the right position in the sky. He remarked that instance would never have occurred to him, simply because he grew up in Little Italy being surrounded by skyscrapers where you would not be paying much attention to the position of the sun.
This is a movie where photography matters, even more so than characters. The camera has to exist in a world apart from the characters. Space, texture, color and light are as important as the characters, perhaps even more so.
The story of the movie is which reality is the Leo character living in. The story that is informing that story is the director attempting to escape his own limitations. One directly informs the other. This is why I believe there is no solid conclusion to the ending, in fact it could very possibly be all 3 things:
1) It really was a cold war spy factory
2) It really was a bunch of escaped Ex-Nazis performing human experiments
3) He really was a lunatic US Marshall who murdered his wife after she drowned their kids
I believe there was a victory here - the director was victorious in his encounter with himself. Here, the camera is not anchored to a person. Here, look at how well we understand the importance of location, architecture, place, space, situation. Exposition was not needed at all. That's the hand of a master storyteller in full embrace of his powers.