Product: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans [Blu-ray] (2009)
Rating: 5.0
Pretending to Be Pretentious ...
... has always been Werner Herzog's trademark, both in his early German films like Herz aus Glas (Heart of Glass) and in all of his American films (he migrated in 1995). But you have to credit him with respect for his audience -- at least most of us -- in that he plainly expects us to recognize a spoof, to enjoy being 'sent up' as we watch our neuroses reflected and exploited. He gives us plenty of semiotic signals, the enigmatic animals that always show up, for instance. In "The Bad Lieutenant", the animals are a camera-conscious alligator, a Siamese fighting fish in a water glass, and a pair of iguanas that may or may not be appearing on the Lieutenant's table. Innocent viewers might be jived into supposing that Herzog's Lieutenant is hallucinating in reaction to his fantabulous intake of cocaine, crack cocaine, cannabis and inhaled heroin, but when the Lieutenant claims to see the soul of a plugged thug break-dancing over his body, I know that you know that Werner knows that neither cocaine nor heroin is hallucinogenic. He's gaming the genre, amigos! Much in the manner that the Coen Brothers game the genre habitually. But Herzog is also gaming his American audience, needling the comfortable and the smug exploiting our insatiable thirst for vicarious violence and our addictions, both open and closeted. Or so I prefer to think ... If "The Bad Lieutenant" is not a sardonic spoof, if even one scene of it represents Herzog's vision of American reality, then either Herzog is a slanderer or America is a more disgusting cesspool of sociopathy than I want to believe.So let's, for our peace of mind, assume that "The Bad Lieutenant" is a comedy, though not of the laugh-out-loud variety. Then we can cosily regard the occasional quiddities of the script -- when the Lieutenant muses about whether fish dream, for example -- as deliberate miss-clues to the intentional meaninglessness of the film. Herzog is, after all, a professed nihilist, who has declared that the Universe is a godless and random place. To wrap up all the catastrophes looming over the Lieutenant in one quick scene replete with Dickens-worthy coincidences -- that is what happens, in an almost happy ending -- has to be recognized as the acme of snarky mockery of all cinema conventions.And Nicolas Cage plays along with Herzog's polymorphous perversity almost as convincingly in English as Klaus Kinski used to do in German. The Lieutenant has a bad back. I know what a bad back looks like and feels like. Cage does the bad back body-torque perfectly. He's too over-exposed, too familiar, to be effective as an actor in any role these days, but that's part of the schema of this film. All the other characters play generic "noir" without a wink.I've given this film five stars provisionally, in tribute to my own interpretation of it as a stealth spoof on America's sofa-bound paranoia. If that interpretation is too far-fetched, if this is supposed to be another raunchy thriller, then it wouldn't merit more than three stars from me.