SPOILER ALERT
I couldn't put off Bad Lieutenant forever. First, it's Herzog, then it's New Orleans; on top of that, I heard an intriguing thing about an iguana, and I couldn't shake it out of my mind.
We begin during the immediate aftermath of Katrina. The police force has disintegrated, along with much of the town. Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) and his partner (Val Kilmer, playing a guy who would very much like to be a badder cop than his partner but doesn't seem to have the flair for it, lacks the imagination or some other je-ne-sais-quoi) find a prisoner about to drown in a flooded holding cell. Initially inclined to lay bets on how long it will take him to submerge, an uncustomary impulse to do the right thing kicks in and McDonagh leaps into the water to save the man, an act which will simultaneously earn him promotion, decoration, and a painful and lifelong disability. For the rest of the film, he is a crooked man, in both soul and physique. He lumbers across it like a Frankenstein's monster, committing crimes large and small to support his habits, escape his pain, keep some semblance of control over a life spinning wildly out of control.
I began, as I always do, feeling uncomfortable with Cage. He is so strange, that guy. In this one he uses a phony voice. In physical terms, it seems like he's moved his voice down from his mask by consciously opening his throat; it sounds like he's trying to sound like a normal person and failing. Maybe that's the desired effect, because God knows his character is one of those thousands who spend (to paraphrase the immortal Camus) an extraordinary amount of energy chasing an elusive appearance of normalcy. I don't think so, though. More likely, that uber-weirdo Herzog took him aside and said (in clipped, sombre, carefully-chosen verbiage, with all "t"s over-enunciated), "I want you to sound like a different person. I want that your own mother, when she hears your voice, shall not recognize you as her son."
In the end, none of that matters. There's nobody in the world plays a particular brand of drug-addled psycho-crazy better than Cage. By the final frames, I was convinced that not only could no one else have played it, but that the mad, stoical, romantic visionary Herzog may have found his new perfect foil: this may be his new Klaus Kinski. No one else would have given that perfect spin to lines like, "You don't have a lucky crack-pipe?" and "Shoot him again. His soul is still dancing." And yes, we do, in fact, see the soul dancing. It dances gracefully and frantically, as if for its very existence. Herzog uses magical realism boldly, deals it with a sure hand and in ideal amounts: it is the device through which he simultaneously communicates the ongoing drug-haze blurring McDonagh's grasp and also the numinous possibilities of a shining spiritual super-reality overlapping the purely physical realm.
That's where the iguanas come in. And not just iguanas, but fish and reptiles of many stripe and color. A snake glides rather beautifully through the filthy flood waters. A crocodile lies dying in the middle of a road; its mate, or perhaps its child, unseen by the humans at the scene, watches it helplessly from the roadside. At his initial crime-scene, McDonagh finds a child's stangely compelling verse written for a beautiful red fish caught in a drinking glass, and it haunts him. The iguanas? these, my friend, you must experience for yourself.
One of the best things about being Werner Herzog, a thing which must make him cackle and rub his hands together with glee, is that you get actors of the quality of Michael Shannon and Brad Dourif in your secondary roles. Eva Mendes is perfect as McDonagh's gold-hearted whore-girlfriend, really stunning. My favorite part,--and I don't want to spoil it by saying too much,-- involves an old spoon and pirate treasure, and delivers a message of hope and the persistence of innocence which easily outweighs the corrosive immorality chewing at this world from the outside.
Who but Herzog would have thought such strange redemption would be possible in a place like New Orleans? Who but Herzog would have given us such Catholic themes, without more than a frame or two of Catholic imagery, in so very Catholic a town as New Orleans? In the end there is so much redemption that he gives us a fairy tale ending... and then he shows us how life goes on afterwards, after the words "happily ever after", life which is not easy.
The piling up of complications is ruthless, and perhaps only believable in the context of so corrupt and magical a city, and the ending is sublime: the fish. The silence. The laugh. Herzog's hand, in fact, is so sure at the helm, his pacing unhurried yet flawless, the music an exact vehicle for the story, neither more nor less, that it's a pleasure to watch it unfold. You can relax into it with the absolute certainty that you're resting in the hands of a master.
