Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Directed by Werner Herzog – US - 2009 
      
It’s like a fantasy dream, or probably just a fun game to play, imagining what directors with real talent might have done with cheap genre movies. The Onion AV Club recently lamented Michael Haneke’s not having made The Road, and legend goes that Orson Welles was attached to direct RoboCop for a short time in the mid-eighties. What kinds of strange or even powerful masterpieces might we have in those cases, as opposed to serviceable cult and future-cult movies? Werner Herzog is, in my opinion, a greater genius than either Haneke or Welles, both immeasurably great directors in their own ways. He has undoubtedly made a deeper, looser, funnier film out of the Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans script than would have someone like Brett Ratner or Michael Mann, blander, more modern talents usually associated with this kind of police procedural/psychological movie. This film is more strange and/or powerful than it is a masterpiece, but there’s been nothing even close to its crazed energy and tunnel/vision certainty in Portland theaters this year.

Herzog has made Nicolas Cage the bad lieutenant, Terence McDonagh, a New Orleans cop sifting through post-Katrina wreckage for the killer in a drug-related execution, or a few grams of coke, whichever his obsessive investigations bring him to first. Cage is a great actor to me,  someone eager to take his fame and his tens of millions of dollars and throw them back in the face of the system he got them from, to show just how successful a truly unhinged actor can be if he has put his mind to it. He isn’t Sean Penn or Harvey Keitel: he’s not truly versatile and he’s an instantly recognizable star, but when, as with this movie, he lets his actorly mannerisms go,  he feels closer to madness, and to suggesting that it all comes from himself, than more soulful actors have ever seemed.

Cage doesn't play McDonagh as a man trying to change his horrible ways, no matter how much they help or hurt his policework. He’s a hopeless addict, to drugs, gambling, women, violence and guns, whatever, and being a cop is simply the easiest way for him to avoid letting his addictions take him to rock bottom. A plainer director would have used this setup for some sort of commentary on the mentality of policemen, or the ease with which disasters in America can be used as fronts by people who terrorize. But Herzog is only interested in McDonaugh’s insanity. Post-Katrina New Orleans isn’t his timely backdrop for character study, the way that Spike Lee’s  post-9/11 New York  was in The 25th Hour. New Orleans isn’t political for Herzog: it’s another of his jungles (Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Little Dieter Needs to Fly) which madman try vainly to conquer. All plot and non-bad lieutenant characters are really subservient to this smeary, unhinged portrait of a lunatic trying to act human amongst the ruins of a city.

This is the best non-Wes Anderson movie playing in Portland now and its crazy, low-rent energy makes a huge, expensive genre movie like Avatar, a supposedly personal epic, look silly and lazy.