Werner Herzog: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)
XIBIT AND CAGE: SOME TARANTINO MOMENTS
Review by Chris Knipp
Cage and Herzog take us on a wild ride with alligators, cuddly dogs, coke, crack, heroin, and some Tarantino moments
'Here he has all possibilities for the wildest exuberance and the vilest and most debased joy in doing bad things.' So says Werner Herzog of Nicholas Cage's work with him in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans -- not really a "remake" of Abel Ferrara's 1992 Harvey Keitel vehicle, though both are about cops losing all moral compass while doing every drug they can get their hands on, and both are memorable collaborations between risk-taking directors and risk-taking actors.
For the sake of comparison let's say Keitel's lieutenant is mired in Catholic guilt, and Cage's goes wrong with wild panache and a heehaw grin. If anyone feels guilty this time it's probably us, for enjoying Lt. McDonagh's bad behavior (which includes extortion and rape) so much. But there's the same kind of cleansing outrage as you get from Tarantino, and when Lt. Terence McDonagh actually teams up with the black drug dealers he's supposed to be hunting down against white sleazebags out to get him for unpaid sports gambling debts and an insult to one of his "pros" girlfriend's better connected johns, you get some genuine Tarantino moments. But they never feel derivative; this has its own unique style derived from the smooth working partnership of these two brilliant eccentrics. But watch out! This goes in some pretty seedy, downright wrong places and breaks the rules of both behavior and storytelling. Like Ferrara's film, and like most of Tarantino's, this one will get some enthusiastic reviews and some disparaging ones. Words like "lurid" get trotted out. Somehow what good movies both Bad Lieutenants are eludes a lot of people.
This is a police procedural, but Cage's character -- acting in the depopulated aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- derails all procedure, yet while seeming to get away with everything, also winds up, in vet cop story writer William M. Finkelstein's screenplay, magically making things right and getting still another promotion. In the opening scene he jumps into a prison cell submerged in water to save a prisoner from drowning and hurts his back. The doctor tells him he can return to work but will be in constant pain, which leads to raiding the police storage of seized drugs, doing crack and coke and heroin and whatever he can filch from others or get by prescription. He had a drug problem already, but this is better excuse than before; he really is hunched over with pain. And somehow the drive to score and overcome the pain keeps him going and the work gets done. Right away Terence gets promoted from sergeant to lieutenant for his "bravery," and is put in charge of a hunt for dealers responsible for a massacre of a family of Senegalese illegals who encroached on their territory dealing heroin to augment their pushcart take.
There's some method in Terence's madness. He's a "bad lieutenant," but he's still effective as a cop. He's like the alcoholic who's so relaxed in an accident he doesn't get hurt, and his numbness to consequences is an advantage sometimes in dealing with thugs. Nobody scares him, and he accepts no limitations. He's cool and collected in interrogations, and knows how to worm information out of the most skittish witnesses. He also threatens young couples coming out of a club just to get their drugs, and when his weapon is taken by authorities for misbehavior and he's assigned to the property room, that doesn't stop him for a minute: the property room is just a handy place to operate out of.
Cage takes us through a rich range of emotions. He is tender and kindly toward his lovely call girl lover Frankie (Eva Mendes). He's scary and threatening to others, including an old lady and her black caretaker, and he can be glum and desperate. Above all he's unpredictable, and after a near-death confrontation, he bursts into laughter. Scenes feel fresh and improvised, and everybody's having fun.
Herzog moves about with "wildest exuberance" himself in showing us a New Orleans that is flavorful and recognizable, but without cliché, and introducing us to a host of colorful places and characters, including a Senegalese funeral, a muted firecracker cop partner played by Val Kilmer, Frankie's glitzy high-rise flat, a posh retirement home and a haughty old lady -- and the funky mansion occupied by Terence's father Pat (Tom Bower), an alcoholic now trying AA (not for the first time), and Pat's beery girlfriend Genevieve (a wonderfully blowsy Jennifer Coolidge), whose cuddly big white dog Terence and then Genevieve get saddled with. Every so often an alligator or a couple of iguanas wander onto the scene, at least the way it looks to Terence. In Twelve Step terms, for Terence "life has become unmanageable" -- irrevocably so. But this derailed quality, and Cage's air of hilarious, hysterical, sometimes paranoid zeal, keeps you on the edge of your seat to see where things will go next. The movie has its own brand of stoned manic energy. Yet Herzog all the while maintains a deliciously light touch.
Many other actors, including Michael Shannon of Revolutionary Road, perform well, and though the movie is obviously dominated by Cage's eccentric,"out-of-the-box" performance, this Bad Lieutenant, unlike Ferrara's, which felt closed-in and dark and desperate, is opened up by the bright New Orleans cityscape and Cage's loose limbs and slack-jawed grin.
While Ferrara's version has justifiably been called "a deeply moral movie" and impresses with its conviction and this one isn't and doesn't, Herzog's new film is still a valid picture of life run amok with addiction. Addicts do seem mad fun sometimes, not only to themselves, and they can get away with things. Terence never repents -- at least not that we can see. But Frankie goes to AA with his father, and winds up in rehab. That makes sense too. As Ebert says, Ferrara's version of this idea is Shakespearean (out of the Actors Studio, anyway) but this one is more Cormac McCarthy, because "sometimes on the road to hell you can't help but laugh." And it's more than a laugh. Due to the inspired collaboration, this new "Bad Lieutenant" turns out to be one of the best American movies of the year.
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Index of Chris Knipp 2009 movie reviews .
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