In Herzog’s non-remake of Bad Lieutenant, Nic Cage tumbles into the farthest reaches of drugged, lawless mania, resembling a coked-up Willy Wonka.
Imagine Gene Wilder as a coked-up Willy Wonka, if that’s not redundant. Fix that wide-eyed, herky-jerky, cackling image in your mind, and you’ll have a good idea of what one Lieutenant Terrence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) looks like as he tumbles into the farthest reaches of drugged, lawless mania in director Werner Herzog’s dark new film, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Though titled about as artfully as a Tomb Raider flick, Bad Lieutenant is possessed of a sleekness and a morbid sophistication that belie the unfortunate clunkiness of its title.
A police detective working in chaotic, post-Katrina New Orleans, Lt. McDonagh possesses a tremendously flexible set of morals and a severe case of chronic back pain, which he manages with handfuls of Vicodin and nostrils-ful of coke. He breaks the law, enforces the law, dates (and cheats on) a hooker with a heart of gold, Frankie Donnenfeld (Eva Mendes), makes nice with drug lords, takes care of his dad’s dog, and otherwise flirts with — and stubbornly resists — classification as an out-and-out baddie. The film itself similarly eludes definition; neither a cop drama, nor an action flick, nor a pulse-elevating thriller, per se — those genre boundaries seem too hackneyed for Herzog, whose long career in film has been rather more ambitious and iconoclastic than mold-fitting. Perhaps the most succinct description has been provided by Herzog himself: in an interview, he described Bad Lieutenant as a meditation on the “breakdown of civility” in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.
Herzog, ever enigmatic, claims not to have seen Abel Ferrara’s original Bad Lieutenant (1992), on which the script for this latest Lieutenant (by screenwriter William Finkelstein) is loosely based. Ferrara’s film starred Harvey Keitel as a New York detective with a penchant for gambling, drinking, pills, powders, and call girls. Keitel’s Lieutenant was muscled and rugged, haggardly glammy, and more than slightly tortured by his Catholic roots — he ends up, in a drug-fueled hallucination, delivering an apologetic monologue to the Lord Jesus himself. But where Keitel’s Lieutenant saw visions of Jesus, Cage’s McDonagh sees visions of iguanas; beyond their shared roster of vices, the two cops have little in common. Under Herzog’s direction, Cage is arguably at his acting best since Adaptation (2002) or thereabouts, playing McDonagh as a sallow, stoop-shouldered, twitchy cop whose remorseless descent into serious addiction and depravity — alternating, periodically, with brief flashes of goodheartedness — tests an audience’s habits of judging and forgiving.
When a Senegalese family falls victim to a chilling mass homicide, the coke-addled McDonagh heads up the murder investigation and finds himself in pursuit of a powerful drug lord nicknamed Big Fate (the rapper Xzibit), whom the Lieutenant quickly recruits as a co-conspirator. McDonagh is strung out and almost constantly high — too debauched, at times, even for Big Fate’s taste. When the investigation isn’t occupying McDonagh’s time, he’s busy lifting coke from the evidence room or calling on his lady friend, Frankie, an ever-patient soul whose flawless glamour looks a bit out of place in the film’s otherwise grungy landscape.
McDonagh’s drug habit gets him into trouble, as does his abuse of his badge and his high-stakes betting on ill-starred football games. But the film isn’t so much about following any particular adventure or dilemma through to its conclusion as it is about ruminating on the characters who populate this dark New Orleans, which cinematographer Ken Kelsch shoots up close and darkly lit, as though the whole city were still underwater. At a leisurely two hours and change, Bad Lieutenant does feel long, though it often finds a pleasurable groove, in which Herzog’s quirkiness of vision aligns with a particularly luminous bit of writing or acting (Jennifer Coolidge is particularly haunting as the girlfriend of McDonagh’s father).
One of the most memorable sequences was photographed by Herzog himself, who zoomed in on a pair of iguanas (the stuff of McDonagh’s hallucination) basking in a shower of bright, sparkling light while the vocal stylings of Englebert Humperdink soar in the background. So captivating is the image, so novel is the whole idea of iguanas and cops and crooning that we’re content simply to bask in it, and not to ask why. Here’s Herzog’s power to enchant, and here’s the best of what we find in Bad Lieutenant — strange creatures, seen from strange angles.
