Port of Call

Every now and then a movie drops out of no where and explodes like a bomb into the cinema. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is one of those movies. It demands being written about, but I am at a loss of what to say.

There are moments in sports when a player you know is really, really good does something similar to what he's done before, but on a little higher level, and it becomes transcendent. Most recently, Peyton Manning winning against the Pats kinda sorta falls into that category. Peyton did what he's known to do, but his performance was upped by getting into Belichick's head about it.

Anyhow, Bad Lieutenant is this for Herzog. He explores his theme of ecstatic truth within a remake of procedural cop movie with a crazy-ass bad lieutenant. And it goes to a level beyond what I imagined Herzog being able to pull off. And pull it off, he did.

Is this Herzog or Cage's movie, though? The slate review:

For all the terrible career choices he's made—his drive to succeed as an action hero seems to come from someplace even deeper than the desire for a huge paycheck—Nic Cage is unparalleled when it comes to playing self-destructive loons, men so uncomfortable with life they want to shed their own skin. As in Leaving Las Vegas and Adaptation, Cage's performance is funny, haunting, and genuinely bizarre. He hunches. He winces. He cackles explosively. As his character gets more and more strung out, his voice changes, growing louder, more pinched and nasal. (Mercifully, he never attempts a New Orleans accent.) He's forever inventing weird little bits of stage business: Before interrogating a witness, he takes an electric razor from his pocket and gives himself a five-second shave. Cage clearly enjoys the chance to play a role this over-the-top. "Right now I'm working on about an hour and a half's sleep," he warns a wheelchair-bound old woman before blocking off her breathing tube to maximize the effectiveness of his interrogation. But he also invests this doomed character with real pathos and never goes for deliberate camp. Whatever sick joke this movie's telling, Cage is in on it.

Cage is unbelievable in this film. You don't even realize the shades of madness until about midway through the movie. At some point, and I can't pinpoint it, I realized - holy shit - this guy has gone though like 20 different levels of insanity and he's still going. The build is remarkable both in the degree and subtly. I buy Cage in every single scene. There isn't a moment when he feels unreal. And yet, the places his performance goes are unknown to me as a human being. I can't imagine 75% of things he does or thinks or feels nor I have experienced those emotions. But it seems as if Nic Cage has. And he turned them into this energetic, mad performance. I swear to god he lost all his money for this role. Or this role caused him to lose all this money.

Thank you Herzog and Cage - you've washed the sour taste of Where the Wild Things Are, The Box, and The Informant from my mouth.