90) Bad Lieutenant

Bad Lieutenant (1992)

Director: Abel Ferrara

Starring: Harvey Keitel, Frankie Thorn, Victor Argo, Paul Calderon, Leonard L. Thomas, Paul Hipp

Kate's gone down the coast for the weekend which means it's movie marathon time. I started with Abel Ferrara's controversial film Bad Lieutenant. It wasn't a film I really knew all that much about, but none the less it has been one which has been on my radar for a while so I thought I'd give it a look, being reasonably confident it was a film Kate would have zero interest in seeing.

A New York Police Department lieutenant (Keitel) is drowning in an ever increasing gambling debt and growing dependence on various illicit substances. When he becomes involved in the investigation of the rape of a young nun (Thorn) he starts to consider the lifestyle he leads.

It's quite difficult to write a plot synopsis for Bad Lieutenant because the plot is seemingly so unimportant. The central event of the film appears to be the rape of the young nun, but it is not as though the investigation of that crime becomes the focus of the film. Rather, Bad Lieutenant is a character study of a man in free fall. In case the title didn't make it apparent, Harvey Keitel plays a lieutenant who is bad. In the film his nameless character, simply credited as 'The Lieutenant' gambles, visits a prostitute, steals, deals drugs, takes drugs (lots and lots of drugs), tampers with evidence and, in a particularly confronting and intimidating scene, masturbates in front of two girls, minors who he has caught driving their father's car without his permission. He is a character study of depravity. There is simply nothing redeeming about the lieutenant. It is a confrontingly honest and intense performance by Keitel, capturing the utter implosion of a human being. Ultimately you'd have to say it is a courageous performance because you couldn't imagine many actors would want to be seen in that light.

A natural point of comparison for Abel Ferrara is Martin Scorsese, though such a comparison might be a bit flattering to Ferrara. Like Scorsese, Ferrara is a very New York centric filmmaker, with a lot of his films being set on the mean streets of New York city. Like Scorsese, Ferrara doesn't shy away from confronting his audience with scenes of violence and drug use. And like Scorsese, Ferrara's work contain interesting religious undercurrents. Bad Lieutenant has a definite Scorsese vibe in terms of the themes it explores, and also in it's narrative structure. It is only more recently that Scorsese's works have become narrative focused. In the 1970s particularly, Scorsese's work, like Bad Lieutenant, was about the characters rather than the narrative. But while it has a Scorsese vibe, it is very much a sub-Scorsese feel. Ferrara's film lacks the polish and sophistication of Scorsese's work, but this is understandable given his background is in B-films and the exploitation market. Ferrara made a name for himself with violent exploitation films like Driller Killer and Angel of Vengeance. A growing cult following allowed him greater budgets and access to bigger name stars. His height was probably in the early 1990s when he made not only Bad Lieutenant, but King of New York which boasted a cast including Christopher Walken, David Caruso, Laurence Fishburne, Wesley Snipes and Steve Buscemi.

It should be noted that Werner Herzog's recent film The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans starring Nicholas Cage is not actually a remake of or a sequel to Ferrara's film. Herzog claims that there is no connection between the two films, although it must be said that there are some similarities. Ferrara wouldn't have a bar of Herzog's claims of it not being connected, saying: "I wish these people die in Hell. I hope they're all in the same streetcar and it blows up." Quite a character.

In another piece of trivia, Bad Lieutenant is the third film in which I've seen Harvey Keitel naked. He also de-robes in The Piano and Holy Smoke. After those three films I think I can safely say that I've seen more of Harvey Keitel's penis than I really needed to.

This movie is not about entertainment or enjoyment. You don't bring popcorn to Bad Lieutenant. This is an in-depth character study of a man crumbling under the weight of his own self-destructive tendencies. For mine, this film is all about Harvey Keitel's performance. Keitel is a very well respected actor, but doesn't quite have the profile of some of his peers (DeNiro, Pacino, Hoffman), but there are very few actors who could portray a character as disgraceful as the Lieutenant with as much conviction and honesty as Keitel does here.