Abel Ferrara was one of the American extreme moviemakers hounded in the 1980s by our tabloid press and the Prince of Wales (in his egregiously populist mode) for the production of "video nasties". His reputation has never quite recovered from the onslaught. But in the 90s, he moved into the mainstream with pictures starring actors prepared to work on the edge, most notably Christopher Walken and Harvey Keitel.
The most celebrated of these, the ferocious Catholic fable Bad Lieutenant, has a no-holds-barred performance from Keitel. As an unnamed cop, he lurches around New York taking immense quantities of drugs and alcohol, stealing from crooks, participating in orgies and yet achieving a sort of redemption through the example of a nun who forgives her Hispanic rapists.
The producer of Bad Lieutenant, as well as of some of the most interesting movies of the past 40 years, ranging from Oliver Stone's Wall Street to David Mamet's Homicide, was Edward R Pressman and he decided last year that the time was ripe to remake Ferrara's picture. So he engaged Werner Herzog to film a new screenplay by William Finkelstein (a writer best known for his work on the police TV series Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue) in New Orleans.
On the face of it, this was rather odd. First, the choice of New Orleans was initially made for the tax benefits of shooting there post-hurricane Katrina. Second, Herzog is a German art house director, now in his late 60s, who develops his highly idiosyncratic material, not a gun for hire, and claims he'd neither seen nor heard of the Ferrara movie. He later said he'd insisted the film be called Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans as it wasn't really a remake, though almost everything in my summary of the plot of the original is in Herzog's film.
Nevertheless, against all the odds, the new Bad Lieutenant is a bizarre triumph. It's both a characteristically excessive Herzog movie and a traditional Hollywood film noir about an obsessed, bent lawman in the tradition of Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends and Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil, the film that features the classic exchange: "Hank was a great detective all right." "And a lousy cop."
Equally, it finds in New Orleans a perfect setting for its complex story. This is a city of faded grandeur battered by the elements where new corruptions are piled on to old ones, where hope and hopelessness mingle. The Czech-born cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger has given the place a rich, elegiac atmosphere of romantic malaise.
Between 1972 and 1988, Herzog made five movies, all with period settings and starring Klaus Kinski, the actor he memorialised in a documentary called My Best Fiend. He played driven men, dancing madly on the edge of the abyss in Europe, Africa and Latin America, and two of these films were masterpieces: Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo.
He has at last found a suitable replacement for Kinski in Nicolas Cage and it's the best piece of work either has done for a decade or more. The film begins as Katrina blows in and the eponymous cop, now given the name Terence McDonagh (suggestive of a Catholicism that remains implied but not declared), plunges into the polluted water of a city jail to save an abandoned prisoner from drowning. He professes his reluctance (he doesn't want to ruin his expensive underwear) and at the end of the movie there's a beautifully handled sequence in which saviour and saved are reunited.
The act of courage leads to promotion to lieutenant, but it leaves McDonagh with a crippling back injury that becomes part of Cage's painful posture for the rest of the film. He also becomes addicted to legal and illegal drugs that make his conduct increasingly irrational. His first task as lieutenant is to investigate the drug-related execution of a family of illegal immigrants from Senegal and he tracks down a reluctant witness who can identify the killers.
Meanwhile, he has gambling debts, is forced to steal drugs from the police evidence room to feed his habit and starts playing off one lot of crooks against the other. He is protective of his girlfriend, an upmarket prostitute (Eva Mendes), and solicitous of his alcoholic father and his much younger stepmother. The booze and drugs make him hallucinate and he sees iguanas in a police surveillance flat and alligators beside the freeway. They are more than a sick man's nightmare; they are metaphors, creatures from the Louisiana bayou, the city's steaming subconscious.
McDonagh's behaviour becomes increasingly outrageous and often horribly funny. He uses his .44 Magnum to threaten a rich, elderly lady in an old people's home and removes her oxygen tubes as punishment for her interfering with the course of justice. "You're the reason this fucking country's going down the drain," he tells her. While he talks on the waterfront with a gangster about fortunes to be made in post-Katrina property development, two of the thug's henchmen are casually disposing of a trussed and weighted corpse in the background.
The mob, debt-collectors, the NOPD internal affairs department and a state senator are breathing down McDonagh's neck until relief suddenly comes as a form of grace. Whether this is the result of an arbitrary fate, the act of an understanding God or some form of Marxist irony is not disclosed in this dark and puzzling film. Cage is stunning, as lacking in self-regard as Brando is in Last Tango in Paris, Keitel in Fingers or De Niro in Raging Bull. His best work since his Oscar-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas, this is acting with every nerve, sinew and cell of an actor's mind and body continually brought into play.
