Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans (2009)
Bad Lietenant: Port of call New Orleans Directed by Werner Herzog Written by William Finkelstein Starring Nicolas Cage; Eva Mendes; Val Kilmer; Vondie Curtis Hall; Shawn Hatosy; Denzel Whitaker; Xzibit; Jennifer Coolidge; Fairuza Balk
Director Werner Herzog claimed not to have been aware of Abel Ferrara or his famously NC-17 rated The Bad Lietenant(1992), when making his latest, which seems virtually impossible, even taking into consideration Herzog himself, who sometimes appears to exist in his own universe. Regardless, his film is a re-make, transplanting Ferrara’s story from the streets of New York City to post Katrina Louisiana.
While low budget indie vet Ferrara used some religious iconography worthy of early Scorcese, the overall approach of his lurid tale of a corrupt drug/alcohol/gambling addicted cop going off the rails was mostly grounded in a kind of verite realism. The German Herzog, however, is less bound by the need to replicate a realistic American street feel and employs repeated surrealistic touches to illustrate various shades of his protagonist’s inebriation and overall psychosis.
Though the narrative journey is similar for the leads in each film, Harvey Keitel’s singular performance was a muscularly unforgettable turn, rivaling the best of his long and successful career. How can one forget his naked bedroom dance? Whether hitting the crack pipe, masturbating in front of a pulled over motorist, or frantically betting Mets games on a street pay phone, his character was probably as poorly behaved as any police officer depicted on screen in the history of cinema, a precursor for Denzel Washington’s magnificient miscreant, Alonzo, in Anton Fuqua’s Training Day.
With his stooped posture, comb over, bugged eyes, and pasty skin, Nicolas Cage, as Officer Terence McDonagh, the 44 magnum toting wild man, moves through the film like a Zombie in desperate search of a final resting place. His hang dog face and strangely inconsistent accent only add to the odd characterization. McDonagh, in agony from a past spinal injury (incurred during the flooding), shuffles through the streets of this tortured, beleagured city, numbing his physical pain with a concoction of drugs and alcohol that would kill the proverbial horse. His relationship with prostitute, Frankie (Eva Mendes), is treated matter-of-factly (of course, a guy like him would date a hooker, right?), and he rolls from one immoral act to another with a kind of grim determination, as if each has been predetermined and he was given little say in the matter.
Herzog’s version is the inferior of the two films, and (despite the directors protestations of ignorance) it’s impossible to view without seeing it through the prism of the first. Ferrara’s film remains woefully underecognized and underrated, perhaps because of its sheer raw, unapologetic brashness. While Ferrara is entirely New York, Herzog is an outsider to this country, and obviously New Orleans, and his film reads like someones version of a waking dream. In Cage, he has found his perfect leading man (well, leaving out Klaus Kinski) - an actor who has spent most of his career working in big budget schlock, but can still be oddly (with an emphasis on the word) captivating given the right part. The film is a kind of playground for the two, though how much synchronicity their individual solo toilings ultimately achieve is certainly open to debate.
No doubt there are moments of black humor in Herzog’s film that equal those in Ferrara’s, though perhaps the concluding scenes devolve into something we’ve seen too many times before. Overall, both films are on the sloppy side, and ultimately amount to stages for their leading men to let it all hang out. Herzog frankly seems more interested in the iguanas that appear on screen than in developing any kind of taut narrative, and while his film is more of a procedural than the original, both criminal cases run secondary to the utter disintegration of the respective main characters. While Ferrara is taken with Catholic guilt and redemption, Herzog is disinterested in that path, and perhaps even disdainful of it.
Though the supporting cast is a good one, there is little room for anyone else to shine. Fairuza Balk does her level best in a small role, though Val Kilmer is wasted as a fellow cop.