director
Abel Ferrara
screenwriters
Abel Ferrara
Zoë Lund
producers
Mary Kane
Edward R. Pressman
cinematographer
Ken Kelsch
music
Joe Delia
editor
Anthony Redman
cast
Harvey Keitel (The Lieutenant)
Frankie Thorn (Nun)
Paul Hipp (Jesus)
Peggy Gormley (Lieutenant's Wife)
Victor Argo (Cop)
Paul Calderon (Cop One)
Robin Burrows (Ariane)
Victoria Bastel (Bowtay)
Fernando Véléz (Julio)
Joseph Micheal Cruz (Paulo)
Zoë Lund (Zoë)
mpaa rating: NC-17
running
time: 98m
u.s.
release: 11/20/92
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
|
The
title of Abel Ferrara's great Bad Lieutenant gives away
its opening joke, but the joke gets a laugh anyway. A man in
a dark suit (Harvey Keitel) -- the script never names him --
drives his two little boys to school. On the way, the kids complain
that their aunt hogged the bathroom. "Next time, you come
tell me," says this upstanding father, "and I'll throw
her the fuck out." He drops the kids off, waits for them
to get out of range, then puts a couple of lines of coke up his
nose. He drives on, stopping at the scene of a crime. What business
does he have here? He steps out of the car and ... pins a badge
to his chest. Jesus, this guy's a cop? That's the joke,
but in Abel Ferrara territory, it's also reality.
Ferrara, a cult director (Driller Killer, Ms. 45,
Fear City, King of New York) with the most twisted
Catholic sensibility this side of Scorsese, has always hopped
between art and exploitation, usually loitering long enough on
the exploitation side to disqualify his films from serious discussion.
With Bad Lieutenant, he hops so hard and fast he leaves
deep footprints on both sides. Yet this stark tale of damnation
and redemption, for all its lurid and freakish aspects, is as
serious as they come. Its reputation and NC-17 rating have preceded
it, as if it were a violent version of Madonna's Sex (the
rating is presumably due to a rape scene, full-frontal male nudity,
and a notorious sequence I'll get to shortly), but it provides
no cheesy thrills, no empty catharsis. Far from being a dirty
Miami Vice, it's one of the few truly challenging and
morally complex movies about salvation.
Keitel the bad lieutenant shambles through the slums of New York,
scoring crack, sticking his dick into anything that moves, making
progressively stupid bets on the Dodgers, and pocketing the money
he confiscates from burglars. We get the point: He's in hell,
and not just the Scorsesean hell of New York. Elsewhere in the
city, two punks brutally rape a nun in the sanctity of her church,
at one point violating her with a crucifix. Though the nun (Frankie
Thorn) knows her attackers, she refuses to name them -- having
already forgiven them. This case doesn't especially interest
Keitel at first ("Women get raped all the time; what's the
difference if they're wearing penguin suits?"), but the
nun's purity, faith, and capacity for love haunt him. Her spiritual
perfection throws a painful light on his own sinfulness. "I'm
blessed," he jokes. "I'm a fuckin' Catholic."
Now he has to prove it -- even if his redemption may also spell
his doom.
Much of Bad Lieutenant is poky and minimalist. Ferrara's
camera stares at Keitel shooting up or dragging his ass off the
couch after a typical night, and the scenes are prolonged for
their own deadpan-voyeuristic sake. The movie isn't the slam-bang
shockfest some reviews would have you believe it is; most of
the action, in fact, is eerie and hushed. The stand-out sequence,
which nobody who sees it will soon forget, has Keitel commanding
two New Jersey girls to do lewd things ("Show me how you
suck a guy's cock") while he masturbates outside their car.
Ferrara shoots the scene casually, with no visual or dramatic
emphasis, as if the lieutenant did this every night. (He probably
does something like it every night.) The scene goes on
and on in the cold drizzle, and when it's over, the way Keitel
abruptly walks away -- as if the Devil had left his body along
with his semen, and as if he were now too humiliated to do anything
but leave -- is comedy at its weirdest. Bad Lieutenant
does shock, but not in the usual ways. Ferrara and cowriter Zoë
Lund (who starred in Ms. 45 and appears here as a junkie)
don't tell you how to feel about their sinner. Because the movie
is so neutral about every sordid thing it shows us, it disarms
easy moral judgment and packs a greater wallop.
The film probably wouldn't work without Keitel, who gives one
of the all-time ballsy performances. Picture his tormented Charlie
from Scorsese's Mean Streets twenty years later, if Charlie
had decided to renounce the mob life and become a cop. Keitel
goes all the way into degradation and shame without really going
over the top, but he also does some things (mewling while wandering
around naked, stoned out of his mind; howling out a profane confession
to Christ) not many other actors could pull off without looking
ridiculous. Keitel risks looking ridiculous, but because he commits
himself so intensely and seems to understand the lieutenant from
the inside out, we accept his flailings as a sort of abstract
journey through fear and loathing. His bad lieutenant has a specific
movie ancestor -- Jack Nicholson's border cop in the little-seen
The Border, a man so demoralized he was desperate to do
one tiny good deed that might redeem him and his corrupt world.
Keitel (a costar in The Border) plays the lieutenant as
an annihilated soul burning in his own sin. He, too, finds himself
compelled to perform a small kindness. But the world isn't obligated
to repay him, and Ferrara seals the film with a long-shot image
of sudden violence and desolation.
I find it amazing, thinking back on Bad Lieutenant, how
skillfully Ferrara demolishes the audience's expectations. It's
customary in movies that a redeemed scoundrel reaps the benefits
of his conversion (it's the basic Scrooge template); in this
film, redemption doesn't guarantee you anything. The most you
can expect is to make peace with your soul and God before everything
turns to shit. There's really no doubt where the lieutenant's
soul is headed, but it can't be much worse than the hell he's
in now. The assumption is that if you can't get into heaven,
you trade one hell for another and hope it's better. Bad Lieutenant
is a true rarity: a profane and unblinking tragedy about faith. |