I saw three new movies on Monday. Each one could have been the best film of the day. I can't choose among them, so alphabetically: Werner Herzog's "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," Atom Egoyan's "Chloe" and Rodrigo Garcia's "Mother and Child." A story involving a cop uncontrollably strung out on drugs. A story involving a wife who meets a hooker. A story about three woman whose lives are shaped by the realities of adoption. Three considerable filmmakers. Three different tones. Three stories that improvise on genres instead of following them. Three titles that made me wonder, why can't every day be like this?
Nicolas Cage and Werner Herzog were surely destined to work together. Radical talents are drawn to one another. Cage tends to exceed the limitations of a role, Herzog tends to exceed the limitations of film itself. Knowing nothing about conditions during the shoot, my guess is they found artistic harmony. If not, they ended up hardly on speaking terms. Either way would have worked.
"Bad Lieutenant" has essentially nothing in common with Abel Ferrara's great 1992 film except for a title. Comparisons are pointless. The performances of Harvey Keitel and Nicolas Cage are both so extreme they're originals. Cage plays a New Orleans cop who at the outset of the film toys with the fears of a convict locked in a cell who believe he will drown beneath the rising flood waters of Hurricane Katrina. He toys, the bastard, but he doesn't let him drown, and ends by injuring his own back.
Eve Mendes and Nicolas Cage in "Bad Lieutenant"
His doctor puts him on Vicodin for pain that may last for the rest of his life. The problem is, if you are on Vicodin for the rest of your life, you are going to need more and more Vicodin and the rest of your life may turn out to take less time than you expect. Cage moves into a mode where he consumes any drugs he can get his hands on--painkillers, cocaine, heroin, you name it. These he obtains any way he can, including theft, confiscation, and raiding the police evidence room. He becomes more and more reckless and desperate. All this connects with a gruesome homicide he's investigating, and some very dangerous people.Another director would have approached this as a genre picture. Herzog envelops the genre and transcends it. His fascination involves the far shores of the human personality. Nicolas Cage is as good as anyone since Klaus Kinski at portraying a man whose head is exploding. It's a hypnotic performance, underlined by the gritty cinematography of frequent Herzog collaborator Peter Zeitlinger.
In a film with many extraordinary shots, there is one that will inspire much discussion. The bad lieutenant is in a room with two iguanas on a table--never mind why. Another director might have used them as a colorful background detail. Herzog finds them irresistable. He frames them in the foreground for what seems an inordinate amount of time, with Cage in the background, sometimes looking at them ominously out of the corner of his eye. We realize, My god! The iguana, to the extent that any iguana can, has Nicolas Cage's eyes!
