AT THE ARTHOUSE

Trippy Bad Lieutenant offers a daring good time

By David Theis

December 14th, 2009 at 9:39 AM

If you’re not a big fan of the Christmas season or if December 25 is simply bearing down on you too fast, check out Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans, the new Werner Herzog film starring Nicholas Cage. The film’s bleached-out colors (it’s more “in gray” than “in color”), along with Cage’s damn-near demented performance as a variously addicted cop, contains not the least whiff of holiday cheer. The movie is funny—very funny—but in a way that will appeal more to your inner Beelzebub than to your Tiny Tim.

The new film is a sort of remake Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant. I say “sort of” because Herzog and screenwriter William Finkelstein took Ferrara’s title and his basic concept of the addicted cop, and jettisoned the rest. (Herzog has even claimed that he never saw the original.) When it comes to trans-Atlantic remakes, it’s usually the American filmmakers who dumb down a properly weighty European original. But Herzog has reversed the process. Except that he hasn’t so dumbed the original down as much as he’s lightened it up and set it free.

Ferrara’s (and Harvey Keitel’s) Bad Lieutenant was ultimately a lost soul who was trying to sin so hard that he would get God’s attention, and the film became an extremely Catholic tale of redemption. But Herzog has dropped the religious quest and simply set Nicholas Cage free, gloriously free, with the material.

Cage responds with the greatest cinematic high wire act since Phillip Petit walked that cable between the Twin Towers in Man on Wire. His character “develops” by becoming more outrageous in the ways he abuses drugs and also people—even nice old ladies—when he’s trying to get them to talk.

As the story plays out, you see that Cage’s lieutenant hasn’t really lost his moral bearings as completely as he seemed to. That’s well and good, but the film’s whiff of moral uplift isn’t what I took away. Instead I remember the iguanas that Cage’s character (but no one else) sees in his hallucinations. (They look very real, and when Cage slaps one you hear the thump.) And the shot of an apparently grieving alligator who seems to have just lost his or her mate when a car ran over it. Herzog actually gives us a shot from the alligator’s perspective and somehow renders the fearsome critter kinda human.

The pleasure, and perhaps even the greatness of the film lies in the freedom that both Herzog and Cage grant themselves. They both “go wild.” But both of them frame and master their daring: Herzog within the restraints of genre film, which he honors, and Cage within the discipline that he ultimately applies to his performance. He does all kinds of tricks out there on the high wire, but never falls off.

I loved Bad Lieutenant, but thinking about it is a little depressing as well. There is so little inspired movie making these days that this film feels like a revelation. When did it become so rare for the movies to show real daring and imagination?