A reptilian experience

New Orleans, aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Police sergeant Terence McDonagh, in an uncharacteristic act of mercy, rescues a prisoner from a flooding cell – despite the fact that he’s wearing “$55 underwear” – and injures his back in the process. He subsequently garners a promotion to lieutenant but also develops an addiction to painkillers which degenerates into cocaine and heroin abuse. Six months later, frazzled and out of it, he is entrusted with a murder investigation, only to plunge into ever-murkier ground as both his drug addiction and gambling make him an even worse lieutenant than when he started. The only thing resembling a buoy in his life comes in the form of his equally coked-up girlfriend, a prostitute named Charlie (Eva Mendez).

The task of any hired film critic is to determine whether a film is ‘worth watching’… no matter what that might entail. And Bad Lieutenant gets a definite ‘yes’ in response to that question – though not necessarily because its aesthetically perfect or urgent in any way. In fact, it probably isn’t to everybody’s taste, despite Herzog’s insistence that he wanted to make ‘a movie for audiences’ (which begs the question: who else were you planning on spending $25 million for?) – it is worth observing as a strange creature, meandering to and fro on its own steam, with little regard or respect for the reality that surrounds it.

And indeed, like the iguanas and crocodiles that pepper the scenery (and whom we’re never sure are real or just a figment of Terence’s drugged-out brain), Herzog’s creation is a harsh, amphibious experience. Reality fluidly melds into fantasy and back again, until you are left unconcerned with what counts as real and what isn’t and, like our protagonist, are simply waiting for the next striking image, the next hit, in the hope of relief and enlightenment. As a cop film, it fails miserably: the protagonist is irremediably unlikeable, every lead and moment of suspense is deliberately fizzled out into either depravity or a surrender to the mundane, and you’re never really sure who to root for.

But as a tripped out evocation of place and character, it is nothing short of an offbeat masterpiece. Personally, I’m not a fan of Nicolas Cage: there is something profoundly uninteresting about his approach to acting… I worry for his facial muscles and lungs, so hard does he grimace, cackle and scream without ever achieving any intimate exposition of his characters. But Herzog seems to have picked him shrewdly: the demented on-screen persona, so often employed to spice up an otherwise mediocre production, finds a perfect home here in Herzog’s impressionistic take of a post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, a city too near a swamp for comfort and, when tilted over the edge by a devastating natural disaster, has no choice but to embrace its amoral, animalistic contradictions.

It would be hard to find a more apt description of our protagonist. In the end, some form of emotional closure is achieved, but you’re never made to feel comfortable. And there might not be a better way to react than with the way Terence himself does: a hiccup of a cackle, the intuitive understanding that this rolling mess called life is simply going to roll on and on.