"It is the essential I am looking for. What is the deepest essential that defines us as human beings?" - Werner Herzog
The original "Bad Lieutenant", directed by Abel Ferrara, powerfully acted by Harvey Keitel and featuring a sublime scene in which Keitel crumbles before Christ, was a load of hot air. With its tale of a thoroughly vile cop who lives in a moral cesspit but achieves deliverance through helping some nuns, Ferrara's themes of Catholic redemption were pulled straight out of the Martin Scorsese textbook, with a little Mel Gibson styled self-flagellation thrown in for good measure.
Those with no use for Catholic angst and pious punching bags should find director Werner Herzog's take on the "Bad Lieutenant" story refreshing. Packed with ridiculous shots of lizards, dancing spirits, goofy gangsters, poetic fish and walking midgets, Herzog has caught those expecting a standard genre flick off guard. But those familiar with Herzog's universe won't be surprised. Herzog's films have always rejected humanocentrism in favour for an absurd, and by extension darkly comic, universe. And so revoking the misdirected energy ("Why aren't you listening, God!?") and exaggerated histrionics of cinema's Gibsons, Ferraras and Scorseses, Herzog instead inserts a landscape of moral and universal chaos. There is no divinity to be addressed, no God to guide Herzog's characters, only malevolence, man one step away from total turmoil.
And so it's no surprise that Herzog's film is set in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Herzog's films often deal with two things: men journeying into and confronting a horrific Nature, and men going crazy with the collapse of their support structures and personal Master Signifiers (God, politics, money, private beliefs, family etc). Here, though, we see the aftermath of these movements. Man has already collided with a kind of cosmic mobocracy and is now pulling himself out of the wreckage. Nature has struck, civilisation has crumbled and so we watch as man begins his slow climb out of the debris, like a lizard clambering its way out of the primordial soup.
But though Herzog always rejects humanocentrism, we can call him a humanist in the sense that his films often deal with questions of ethics. The end result is, like "Stroszek", not just another flick about a man and a hooker trying to do what's right, but mankind wrestling with questions of autonomy: how to be an autonomous subject in a world that limits self determination? How to hold fast to personal laws and disciplines in a world which is lawless, amoral and irrational? How to serve others when addiction, self-preservation and self-interests are seemingly hardwired into our bones?
Nicholas Cage, who plays the "Bad Lieutenant" character in Herzog's film, is frequently linked to Christ (standing next to Christ paintings etc), but like most men is both a saviour and a man who needs to be saved. The film opens with Cage diving into water to rescue a man (he will henceforth be linked to fish), an act of altruism which results in him permanently damaging his spine. To combat spinal pains, Cage turns to drugs, but soon develops an addiction. The rest of the film will be populated by characters caught in a strange web of moral chaos. Alcoholics will turn sober, feuding women will become friends, prostitutes will kindly take care of dogs, drug addictions will stem from acts of kindness, traffic cops will help despite getting nothing in return, junkies will turn into saviours etc etc. There are no clear-cut distinctions here, only people caught between a desire to serve themselves and to serve others and people desiring to help others but unable to help themselves.
The film ends with a moment of spirituality typical of Herzog. "Do you dream of fish?" a burnt-out Cage asks, his line recalling the words of a now dead child whose murderer, the appropriately named Big Fate, Cage obsessively tracks down. "My friend is a fish," the child said, "he live in my room. His fin is a cloud. He see me when I sleep."
But what Herzog's climax alludes to is the big fish in the cloud, the benevolent God who watches us while we sleep, revealed to be all around us, in the helping hands of the denizens of Louisiana's flooded streets (in early Christianity, the fish symbol is based on the Greek word ichthus, which became a Grecian acronym for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour"). Despite its irreverence and vulgarity this is thus a very warm film, Herzog's spirit best epitomised by a female traffic cop who helps our hero despite his refusal to give her some hot, drug fuelled sex. You don't scratch my back, but I'll scratch yours anyway. Keitel's Christ would be proud.
Incidentally, many have stated that Cage's performance compares unfavourably with Keitel's. What Cage's performance does, though, is reveal how silly Ferrara's overly earnest film always was. Cage, in contrast, with his Frankenstein shoulders, hunchback, hilariously large gun and Klaus Kinski haircut, is not only a demented villain right out of a German Expressionist horror film ("The Man Who Laughs"), but offers Cage another chance to indulge in the kind of zany scenery-chewing he adores. Cage's character is always acting, pretending or lying. He acts the part of a cop whilst being a crook, a crook whilst being a cop, straight when high, dedicated when desperate, confident when lost and approaches everyone he encounters with a new face, even fooling we the audience, as we're never quite sure exactly where his loyalties lie. Is he undercover or under-undercover? Is he saved or still stoned?
Of course it doesn't matter, as Herzog anticipates the continual collapse and rebuilding of his characters, like New Orleans' decimation and subsequent reconstruction. No good deed goes unpunished, Herzog says, but do it anyway.
8/10 – Worth two viewings.
