Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans — what an ungainly title for a movie. What does it mean? What kind of sense does it make? You might ask the same questions of the film itself, directed by Werner Herzog and related, by some equally puzzling movie-business genealogy, to another Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara’s 1992 tour of New York law-enforcement hell. Neither remake nor sequel, this Bad Lieutenant is its own special fever-swamp of a movie, an anarchist film noir that seems, at times, almost as unhinged as its protagonist.
Fueled by Nicolas Cage’s performance — which requires adjectives as yet uncoined, typed with both the caps-lock key and the italics button engaged — Herzog’s film is a pulpy, glorious mess. Its maniacal unpredictability is such a blast that it reminds you just how tidy and dull most crime thrillers are these days.
The genre, once a repository of weirdness, wild emotion and sly cinematic invention, has recently devolved into a state of glum, routine sadism. The stories lurch toward phony and mechanical surprise endings, and the heroes tend to be glowering ciphers of righteous vengeance, exacting payback and muttering second-hand tough-guy catchphrases.
Not Terence McDonagh, Cage’s New Orleans cop, who clings to an insane sense of professionalism even as his demons drive him around every bend in the Mississippi River. (Am I talking about the actor or the character? It may be a tribute to Cage’s genius that I’m not quite certain.) Over the years Cage has done his action-hero duty, from Con Air to the National Treasure movies, and he has often been more interesting than a lot of his peers, holding on to some of the idiosyncrasy that makes him worth watching even at his least inspired. Here, though, he is a jittery whirlwind of inventiveness, throwing his body and voice in every direction and keeping McDonagh, the movie and the audience in a delirious state of imbalance.
Sometimes his loose-limbed shuffle and sibilant drawl suggest Jimmy Stewart as a crackhead. (Is there any other movie actor who can summon such a phrase to mind?) At other moments he breaks out in hip-hop non sequiturs, crowing: “To the break of dawn! To the break of dawn!”
He hallucinates iguanas, takes care of a dog and whispers sweet nothings to his call-girl girlfriend (Eva Mendes). He gambles. He steals. He shakes down college boys and gropes their dates. (Now I’m talking about the character, not the actor.)
And — if I may indulge a hip-hop non sequitur of my own — it’s all good. What may seem like random, dissociated bursts of energy are in fact the brilliant syncopations of a player with a sure, if unorthodox, sense of rhythm.
I’m still referring to Cage, but also to Herzog, who sets William Finkelstein’s properly pulpy screenplay to his own strange music. (That’s a metaphor. The actual musical score, by Mark Isham, is serviceably atmospheric.)
McDonagh’s ordeal begins during Hurricane Katrina, when he injures his back committing a reckless act of decency in the line of duty, freeing a prisoner from lockdown as the waters rise. For his pains McDonagh acquires a promotion and a drug habit, which combines with his gambling addiction and his fondness for the company of Frankie (Mendes) to make him a ripe target for an internal-affairs investigation.
That happens, sort of, as does a murder investigation and a whole lot of other stuff, including McDonagh’s entanglement with a drug dealer evocatively named Big Fate (the rapper Xzibit). On the run and at loose ends McDonagh drops in on his dad and stepmom, who seem to be wandering around the set of a Tennessee Williams play without a script.
Who needs one? Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans — why “Port of Call”? what does that mean? — is no masterpiece, but it is undoubtedly the work of a master. For nearly 40 years Herzog has pursued madness and unreason in various manifestations — he found them, most reliably, in the person of Klaus Kinski — and sometimes succumbed to their allure. Lately he has mellowed somewhat, examining driven, obsessive souls through a ruminative documentary lens and analyzing their passions with wry, sympathetic detachment.
Terry McDonagh — which may be to say Cage as well — enters a realm where craziness and craft become one, but Herzog does not follow him all the way. There is discipline in Bad Lieutenant, and a principled respect, similar to that shown in Herzog’s war movie Rescue Dawn, for the pleasures and requirements of genre.
The atmosphere is redolent with corruption and need, and nutty as the movie sometimes is, its brutality and confusion are never played for laughs. It has a warped sincerity, and an energy that keeps going and going. To the break of dawn!
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