New Bad Lieutenant Makes Me Reevaluate Everything I Thought I Knew About Bad Lieutenants

Nicolas Cage is the snapped glowstick of cinema.  Every decade or so, the weirdest member of the Coppola family drops his slightly-unorthodox-leading-man schtick and stars in a movie so demented and unhinged that something in his performance breaks, and some bright toxic elixir of pure craziness sprays out.  In The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Cage nearly empties himself out.  What it all means, I don't know. But it's entertaining as hell.

For those of you who have wondered what an American cop movie from Werner Herzog would look like - wonder no more.  The director of everything from Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre The Wrath of God to Grizzly Man (my vote for best film of the decade) and Rescue Dawn, Herzog has developed a reputation for going to bizarre extremes in his filmmaking.  Extremity is both his method and his subject, and in BL:POCNO he focuses on Terance McDonagh (Cage), an ostensibly decent policeman whose instinct for justice is inextricable from an unending appetite for violence, drugs and depravity.

Cage's twisted cop, a character willing to break nearly any law in the pursuit of justice, is a figure that has become increasingly recognizable in recent years as a counterpoint to the noble souls of the CSI and Law & Order franchises.  He smokes pot in front of suspects, shakes people down for measly amounts of drugs, and steals from the property room.  His girlfriend is a drug-addicted prostitute (played by Eva Mendes), and he's mistaken for her pimp at crucial moments in the film.  It's an easy mistake to make.

In some ways it's hard to make a judgment on this film.  Herzog seems so uninterested in the conventions of police films that he treats most of the stock parts - the hard-ass captain, the pissed-off District Attorney, the inevitable interrogation scenes with stonewalling interviewees - as throwaway bits.  The cinematography seems deliberately stagy at some points and ugly at others - let's just say that this film will not draw any tourists to New Orleans. And the ending is so deliberately slap-dash and implausible that you're sure Herzog has made an elaborate joke, with your admission as the punchline.

But I forgive Herzog everything, because he stages some of the strangest moments in film that I've seen in years.  They are so strange that they trip over into the transcendent, a reminder of film's ability to  burn images so indelibly in your brain that they seem like fragments from your own dreams.  I would gladly buy a ticket to this movie over and over again just to watch Nicolas Cage means when he says "Shoot him again.  His soul is still dancing".

Comments

[BaltimoreGal]

Best opening line of a post ever.

[Kim]

This is worth a thousand Ghost Riders.

Although, I liked that movie. You know, for what it was.

[SciFi Dad]

Stranger than Harvey Keitel masturbating on a parked car while a teenage girl simulates fellatio from the driver's seat?

[Palinode]

@BaltimoreGal - Thanks! I was going to go with mashing the keyboard with my fists, but I opted for coherence at the last moment.

[Palinode]

@Kim - I have yet to see Ghost Rider. I'm sure it's bad. It's out there in my future right now, waiting for me to love it.

[Palinode]

@SciFi Dad - Stranger than that. Even stranger than Keitel masturbating while one girl mimes the fellatio and another girl pulls down her pants and shows her butt.

In all seriousness, I don't want to be too specific about the strangeness in the film, because any description would only diminish it. And you may watch it and think: This isn't odd. This is ridiculous. And hypothetical future you may be right to think so.