البـــــوابـــة
The
Bad Lieutenant — Port of Call: New Orleans
It's been literally decades since Werner
Herzog has made a truly satisfying fictional film. It seems obvious
that, since at least the late 1980s, the director's interest has
increasingly turned towards documentary and pseudo-documentary, while
his fiction features have become less and less frequent, and more and
more uneven. The Bad Lieutenant — Port of Call: New Orleans
is, then, an unexpected revitalization of Herzog's instincts for
fiction, a non-remake of the sex-drugs-and-violence-packed 1992 Abel
Ferrara film Bad Lieutenant. Herzog's supposed remake, made
with absolutely no knowledge of Ferrara's original and with only the
most tenuous of connections — there's a lieutenant! and he's bad! —
takes the basic premise of a corrupt cop and spins it out into a
ludicrous (a)morality tale about the delicate balance between good and
evil that exists within this addled New Orleans cop. Terence McDonagh
(Nicolas Cage) is dirty in nearly every way. He's a drug addict who
steals and snorts prodigious amounts of drugs, balancing heroin and coke
and prescription painkillers. He sleeps with (and provides drugs to)
the prostitute Frankie (Eva Mendes) and intimidates and rips off her
clients whenever he encounters them. He stalks drunken and drugged-up
kids coming out of clubs, holding them up for their stashes. He's an
outrageous and lunatic figure, representing a wackier and goofier
variation on Harvey Keitel's drugged-up psychopath in Ferrara's original
film.
Herzog's first ingenious move was casting Nicolas Cage in
this part and fully exploiting the actor's tendency towards over-the-top
melodramatics. Cage's performance is something truly strange and
unique, the work of an actor pouring all of his seemingly worst
qualities into a character and really making him come alive. McDonagh's
collapse, his moral degradation, is eloquently conveyed in every aspect
of Cage's performance, from his permanent crooked slouch (evidence of
the on-the-job injury that set him off on his painkiller addiction) to
his twitchy mannerisms to the tortured cadences of his speech, shifting
from drawled mumbling to coked-up hyperactivity with a moment's notice.
For such a bizarre, purposefully overblown performance, Cage never
forsakes the subtleties that suggest his character as fully as the more
obvious gestures do. It'd be tempting to call this a "bad" performance,
and it often seems like one in its superficial aspects. But Cage's
oddball speech rhythms and over-emphasized facial tics only contribute
to the unease generated by the character of McDonagh, by his
unpredictable vacillations between hero cop, drug dropout and borderline
psycho. It is, in its weird way, a disarmingly subtle performance.
Of
course, the obvious gestures get most of the attention here, and with
good reason. The film rolls out one nutty premise after another, right
from the opening in which — after a few moody, blood-red-lit shots of a
snake winding through a flooded jail cell — McDonagh and his partner
Stevie (Val Kilmer) take bets about how long it will take for the rising
water to drown a trapped prisoner. This comes only a few minutes after
an onscreen title announces that the film takes place in the aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina; the cops' irreverent attitude towards their
responsibilities thus suggests a satirical perspective on the response
of various US institutions and authorities to this tragedy. Of course,
such social consciousness is not common in Herzog, and the remainder of
the film addresses such issues only obliquely, in the form of the
not-so-subtle markers of race and class that are constantly defining and
limiting these characters. The incident that triggers the plot is the
murder of a family of Senegalese immigrants, apparently a drug crime,
and one of the film's looniest contrivances — and that's really saying
something — is the fact that the police immediately make this crime a
high priority. Herzog underlines the absurdity of it all, announcing the
film's undeniable status as fantasy: the police captain tells his men
that this crime will be their big concern and that any amount of
overtime is justified, as if the police always dedicate such attention
to the murders of black illegal immigrants who were tangentially
involved in the drug trade.
Race is continually an unsettling
presence in this film, particularly in a scene where McDonagh is
confronted by a relative of the murdered family, who delivers a
completely unfettered expression of grief that's nearly embarrassing in
its nakedness and uncontrolled despair. Her performance is as unhinged
as Cage's, and the meeting between them is a vortex for all of the
film's ungainly and often ugly emotions: a black woman's grief and a
white cop's frazzled guilt and half-functioning desire to do good. The
caricaturing of this women makes the scene especially uncomfortable, but
at the same time her pain and anger are palpable; like many things in
this film, it's a potent combination of the awkwardly stylized and the
startlingly real.
More often, McDonagh's negative impulses win
out, in one nutty scene after another. High on drugs on a stakeout, he
hallucinates a pair of blues-crooning iguanas, who Herzog films from a
skewed perspective with their gaping lizard jaws pressed up to the lens.
The emphasis on cold reptilian blankness, as a parallel to McDonagh's
white-hot messiness, is repeated in the scene when McDonagh tries to
bully a favor out of a hard-nosed traffic cop; the scene takes place at
an accident site where a car has hit an alligator and flipped over, and
at the end of the scene Herzog pans away to the roadside where a second
alligator is roaming along the grass. Later, McDonagh sees a dead
mobster's "soul" breakdancing, dressed like the dead man but younger,
with a spiky mohawk. It'd be an empty surrealist moment if not for its
context, if the criminal hadn't just moments earlier delivered a bitter
speech about how he was growing old and had sacrificed the dubious
thieves' morality that had once been a point of honor for him. In this
context, the mobster's soul dancing after his death becomes disarmingly
poignant, one last burst from the youthful, hopeful spirit that still
obviously lingered somewhere within this hateful, greedy, violent man.
It's a sign, perhaps, of what's to come for McDonagh himself, who
maintains hints of decency within his overall corruption.
Herzog's
woozy, off-kilter cinematography is a perfect complement to McDonagh's
increasing descent into lunacy and corruption. The camera occasionally
takes on McDonagh's subjective perspective explicitly — as when it
captures his iguana hallucinations — but more often it's maintaining a
delicate balance between cool mediating distance and uncomfortable
intimacy. When McDonagh accosts a pair of teens coming out of a club,
Herzog opts for the latter, pushing into an unsettlingly sexualized
closeup as the young girl, grasping instantly that McDonagh's up to no
good, adopts a confrontational, seductive manner, finally blowing crack
smoke directly into his mouth while kissing him. It's yet another
example of how hyper-stylized everything is here, how heightened the
film's reality is; every situation McDonagh encounters is blown up to
epic proportions by the intensity of the filmmaking and the over-the-top
performances. Even the casting conspires to make this a skewed
Herzogian vision of New Orleans. McDonagh's bookie (Brad Dourif) and the
property room clerk (Michael Shannon) who steals evidence for him are
both played by favorite Herzogian actors, actors very well-suited to the
bombast and allegorical heft of this story.
The resulting film
is a delirious, oddball journey unlike anything else — which would be
par for the course for Herzog except that it's also surprisingly unlike
any other Herzog film as well. McDonagh has hints of the driven
Herzogian lunatic/hero in his personality, but in other ways this feels
very distinct from the typical Herzog film. Still, the director's
personality infuses the film in more subtle ways, particularly in the
ironic ending: in a very rapid series of scenes, everything is resolved
for McDonagh in the most unrealistic ways, as sheer luck steers the
disintegrating cop away from what had seemed to be a collision course
with utter disaster. It would seem to be the opposite of Herzog's
nihilism and pessimism, an ode to traditional values — marriage, family,
sobriety, honor — as holding back the void. However, the extreme
unreality of this denouement undermines the seeming optimism and good
cheer: it becomes a parody of a happy ending, barely containing the dark
energy at the story's core. Herzog reinforces this impression by
looping back to a virtual repeat of an earlier scene of depravity,
revealing that even in his moment of triumph and seeming redemption,
McDonagh is unable to truly reform. The film ends on a darker note
that's more in keeping with Herzog's skeptical view of the universe,
with a metaphysical final shot that positions McDonagh in relation to
the primitive depths of the ocean. For Herzog, man is only one more
violent, instinct-driven animal, and in that respect at least the wild,
uncontrollable McDonagh winds up being very like a Herzogian hero after
all.
لا يوجد حالياً أي تعليق