Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans
Werner Herzog | USA | 2009
122 min
I realised very late into Bad Lieutenant that perhaps it was not meant to be taken seriously. Werner Herzog is an eccentric director — his inquisitiveness knows no bound (as evident by his wonderful documentaries); but as a filmmaker he seems to enjoy unorthodox approaches, you know, the kind that conventional Hollywood rarely takes. Bad Lieutenant is just such a film. Edgy without being hip, uplifting in a strange way without making its central character possess any redeemable quality.
No one plays over-the-top as well as Nicolas Cage does, and here he cranks it up a notch or two. Not only is his character a rogue policeman in post-Katrina New Orleans, but he’s also an addict, in bed with the very criminals he seems to be pursuing, in love with a prostitute, prone to random acts of violence and sexuality on strangers; the list pretty much goes on. Cage makes this monster watchable. We root for him. The film puts him in one dangerous setting after another and just when you think he’s going to get his comeuppance, Herzog does something strange, almost goofy with the setting: he gives us a last act completely at tangents with where we think the film might be heading. This is not a twist, it’s not fate, this is just the way Herzog operates. Bad Lieutenant is his second American film, but just like he did with Rescue Dawn, the first of his non-German films, he seems to make fun of the predictable banality of every day cinema.
I have mentioned that Nicolas Cage’s character is without redemption. Read that carefully and remember it. It is not just an observation, in the film it is a fact. At one point we feel that the script could project into Training Day territory — Terrence McDonagh, the character Cage plays, is investigating the murder of a Senegalese family that dealt in drug trafficking. He gets too involved in the case, mixing in his personal life, as any good opportunist would, to make some quick money in order to pay off his gambling debts. In a lesser film, with the spiraling situation getting out of control, sure disaster would strike. Here something strange happens, something that fits nicely with the peculiar vision that Herzog has in store for his character.
The film has faults, including its slow brewing start, which essentially feels like a police procedural and seems to go nowhere, but once it does we not only get to see Cage in his mad glory, but also oddities like a sequence filmed form the point of view of swamp alligator (don’t ask, just see it already). Parallels could be made about how McDonagh gets away with the things he does, the state of New Orleans post-Katrina, and how people took advantage of the devastated city. There is some debate still brewing about whether the film is a remake or inspired by Abel Ferera’s 1992 film of the same name (unseen by me). Herzog insists it isn’t; this may be his idea of a joke as well.
