Review: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

My goodness. I hardly know where to begin. Werner Herzog took me on the strangest trip, with Nicolas Cage as my erratic, no, insane tour guide, and I still feel exhausted and weirdly exhilarated every time I think about it.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is not a conventionally Good Movie. It's not gonna sweep the Oscars. I stifled laughter in the wrong places, and in a few places I simply could not stifle a giggle. But I must say there was never a dull moment, and it was rarely predictable ... and how many movies can you say that about these days? I was having far too much fun to look at my watch or take notes or fidget.

Nicolas Cage is the bad lieutenant of the title, but his character, Terence McDonagh (not to be confused with H.I. McDunnough), wasn't always that way. Poor guy tried to save someone in the post-Katrina floods and ruined his back, causing him to be promoted to lieutenant and addicted to all manner of painkillers. Now he's stealing evidential drugs, confiscating illegal substances from kids in the Quarter for his own use -- while raping their dates -- and generally being as nasty as he wants to be. However, he still wants to see justice served in a drug-related murder case he's been assigned to solve.

Herzog seems to have let Cage be as unrestrained as he wants to be as McDonagh, and this means a continually twitchy acting style, a bizarrely hunched-over appearance that recalls vampires, even changes in the way the character talks. It would be incredibly annoying in any other film, but this film is so watchably weird that Cage fits right in.

He's surrounded by a great and varied troupe of characters, played beautifully: Eva Mendes as the hooker girlfriend with a heart of gold, Val Kilmer as an even more heartless police officer, Brad Dourif, Michael Shannon, Jennifer Coolidge (who isn't afraid to let herself look like she's been run over with a truck), and Irma P. Hall.

I'm from the New Orleans area, and I often get annoyed by the usual stereotypes in film: New Orleans is only the French Quarter (with a swamp right next door), we all eat beignets for breakfast, we sound either like Scarlett O'Hara or some Cajun. I realize that I have just described an entirely different movie, The Princess and the Frog, admittedly a fairy tale. Bad Lieutenant is another kind of fairy tale, the one where the kids get eaten up and the trees attack and the trolls are genuinely scary.

My point, however, is that Bad Lieutenant is one of the few movies I've seen that depicts New Orleans in a fairly realistic fashion, except of course for the implication that the city is riddled with crime and corruption. I would never say that about New Orleans. (I leave that to The Simpsons.) But the actors don't put on horrible fake accents, a range of neighborhoods in the city are shown, and I didn't roll my eyes at the way the city was portrayed. The characters even pronounce New Orleans street names correctly, amazingly enough.

I admit that when I first heard the title, I was skeptical -- I associate the term "Port of Call" with a hamburger joint in New Orleans, and I thought this would be much cheesier than anything you'd find there. It is, but not in a bad way. People in Austin are already starting to turn this film into a cult hit -- I've heard references to the "lucky crack pipe" and a lot of "To the break of dawn!" since I saw this film. And then there are the iguanas. They sing.

If you like tidy costume dramas, or realistic performances, or need your movies to make sense, you may not appreciate Bad Lieutenant. Personally, I got a huge kick out of it, and am hoping to drag my husband along when I see it again, although he may not speak to me afterward. Alamo Drafthouse has crafted a new pre-show that highlights many of Nicolas Cage's more bizarre performances, which should provide an even crazier total experience.