Somewhere in the middle of Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, police lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) bets on New Orleans and loses big. Cage, looking like he wandered off the set of The Shield and humped all the way to Louisiana in a bad suit and a mescaline haze, is in the grip of several addictions and neck-deep in various permutations of shit, but he just can't stop betting on the Saints. Over the course of this punchy, seriously strange (if less seriously essential) film, McDonagh becomes an extension of the blighted port -- one of the friendliest cities in the country and also the most violent -- making up rules as he goes along, incandescently self-destructive yet plainly bent on his own survival.
"They just like to fuck with you," my friend assured me a couple of weeks ago, after we were pulled over by the NOPD and were sitting quietly in her car, waiting for the officers to approach. There were no plates on her car, and she didn't have a license, so I was pretty sure we were both going to jail, but the officers just shone their flashlights in our faces and waved us on, satisfied with the shrink-wrapped plate she pulled from the back seat. "They want you to think they're watching. If we were black, though, it would be a different story." The rules are relative -- or simply capricious -- in Bad Lieutenant as well: In the opening scene we see the flooded, sunken holding cell of a jail, circa August 2005; McDonagh's partner (played by Val Kilmer) suggests leaving the lone prisoner trapped inside to die, but McDonagh, in an act of valor that leads pretty directly to his descent into drug addiction and its attendant felonies, dives down to save him.
Back in the resplendently weird form of films like Raising Arizona and Wild at Heart, Cage's sad old lady face and baggy, loose-limbed depravity suit the role well, although the latter is slightly modified by a scoliosis hitch in his shoulder, the result of the back injury sustained while saving prisoner X. The injury, however, doesn't interfere with his ability to bone a young woman in a parking lot while her boyfriend is forced to look on, an indignity added to having just been shaken down by a cop for the drugs he was holding. Just who is the crack whore is the questioned begged by this early, over-the-top sequence: everything's topsy-turvy, no one knows their place anymore, if they ever did, and no one really cares.
Director Herzog, perhaps free now to shed the year or so of churlish coquetry on the subject of whether this film would be a sequel, remake, or homage to Abel Ferrara's 1992 predecessor of the same name, made a wise but difficult choice in relocating the scenario to New Orleans. How does one shoot a noir in a city without shadows? Herzog favors the baking, uninterrupted sunlight of the low-slung, literally washed out wards of the city over the French quarter and more lush, colonial strips. Even indoors, when for instance McDonagh is visiting his troublesome but sweet call girl girlfriend (Eva Mendes), the light is bright and flat, almost oppressively so. The shadows manifest themselves in other, more material ways: McDonagh keeps seeing iguanas -- ugly, awesome little beasts who turn up on a kitchen table during an interrogation and cock a haughty eye to the camera during one of the film's hinkiest scenes. Several of nature's people figure in a similar way: a pet fish in a bag, a heaving dog in a car, and a snake winding through the flood waters reenforce the film's sunburned cast of displacement, lost bearings. When, ultimately, a soul is displaced from its body, McDonagh looks on with glee as it proceeds to do some killer breakdancing in the middle of the room.
Loosely structured as a procedural (McDonagh is investigating the drug-related murder of a Senegalese family), Bad Lieutenant is more concerned with conjuring an atmosphere of existential decay and giddy foreboding than the moral investigation and glum anxiety of (forgive me, Werner) the original. As our conduit, Cage embodies the perversities of a crooked cop who's often as bad at being bad as he is at being good: McDonagh, introduced as a hero, descends into badge-flashing tyranny, an entitled, compulsive prick who's not even wrong. "This is a government of law, not men," are the words engraved on the New Orleans city hall, but Bad Lieutenant has a whole lot of fun suggesting otherwise. McDonagh may be nuts, but treating law and order (to say nothing of ethics) like a kind of personal pyramid scheme -- take some, swap some, give some, just keep that fucker rolling -- is hardly the purview of the insane, or even the merely bad. Some might say it's the American way.