Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. 2009. USA. Directed by Werner Herzog. Written by William M. Finkelstein. With Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Jennifer Coolidge, Val Kilmer, Brad Dourif. 35mm. 122 min.
Though the mystery of the film’s relationship to Abel Ferrara’s original Bad Lieutenant (1992) remains unsolved, Werner Herzog’s feel-bad, drug-addled tale of a corrupt police sergeant on the brink is just as loose, gritty, and discomfiting as Ferrara’s original. Starring a mid-career Nicolas Cage at his ambling, freewheeling best, the film mixes a woozy police thriller with flourishes of the city’s surrealistic, reptilian underbelly, a war zone that doesn’t seem to recognize that it is one.
This is not an idealized depiction of post-Katrina New Orleans, or even a neatly realistic one; it is a psychologically dense study of the city as an open wound: a place whose infrastructural corruption has festered even while rebuilding after the storm. Here, rehab and addiction prove pliant metaphors for a civil-structural rottenness—including a wayward police force—that refuses to heal. There are hard truths to be found in the film’s kaleidoscopic ugliness.