Glimpsing Christ on the mean streets of Abel Ferrara's New York: Bad Lieutenant returns

There are films—we sometimes call them character studies—we’re best advised to watch and re-watch without concern for continuity or sweep, suspense or forward-motion. We marvel at, or are at least compelled by, the individual moments that hover somewhere in the haze of the whole, suspended like some fleeting exhibit. I hadn’t seen Abel Ferrara’s cult film Bad Lieutenant (1992) in at least a decade, and I returned to it with one wave of fascinated, slightly nauseated familiarity after another. It concerns a haggard, brazenly corrupt middle aged cop (Harvey Keitel) and his tentative, confused emergence from what seems a very long tour—going back as far, perhaps, as Taxi Driver (76)—through the special internal inferno that awaits god’s lonely men when dwelling in the crowded, sordid Petri dish that is, or was, New York City. To my surprise the film resonated more with me now that when I was younger and inclined to feel impressed by anything affecting a post-Scorsese, gritty, skuzzy, rock and roll verisimilitude. Bad Lieutenant is audacious, somewhat pretentious, perhaps excessive. It’s also harrowing, genuinely crazy in its construction, slyer than it at first seems, and facilitates one of the great raw, only partially comprehensible, out-on-a-limb star performances.

Some of those moments: Keitel’s unnamed Lieutenant stumbling, stoned out of his mind, listening to Johnny Ace croon ‘Pledging My Love’ in some strange woman’s apartment, eyes shut, his bulldog torso naked, his arms extended in some Christ-like pose or perhaps an attempt to fly, emitting this weird whimpering sound like my dog used to make when he wanted something and knew he wouldn’t get it if he barked; Keitel hunched over the driver’s side window of a car, two big haired sisters from Jersey in the front seat, a misty rain rendering the three of them seemingly isolated in the night, while he gets one of them to expose her ass and the other to perform a pantomime fellatio; Keitel, already buzzing with the possibility of his own redemption, getting high with two already severely incapacitated crackhead rapists on a crack house couch. Save the last of these, you might have to work to remember where such scenes fall in the course of the narrative. But you’re unlikely to forget the scenes themselves. They stain your brain, like those traces of certain drugs that we’re told never really go away.

There are so many beautifully selected details in Bad Lieutenant: the Jesus blanket and plastic cover on the sofa of the polite Puerto Rican dealer’s apartment; the door that always gets stuck in the tiny, wallpapered apartment of Keitel’s pretty, intermittently articulate junky pal Zoë (played the film’s co-writer, the late Zoë Lund); the gum that Keitel asks the Jersey girl to spit into his hand. Yet the choice of ‘Pledging My Love’ is especially inspired. Johnny Ace killed himself back in ’54 playing Russian roulette, and such recklessness is perfectly aligned to what’s presented as the status quo for the Keitel character. Within the first 15 minutes we’ve seen him drinking, snorting, screwing, stealing, harassing and gambling himself into oblivion. Another actor might have tried to make the character ingratiating or, even worse, confused his self-destruction with diabolical glee. But Keitel makes everything he does seem more pathetic than fiendishly cruel. He somehow lets us know that this creature possesses a soul. He pours his heart into it, without judgment, and his abandon can result in bizarre black humour, which works too—take the moment where he gets so upset listening to a baseball game while driving his car that he shoots his radio. Ferrara says he originally conceived the film as a comedy anyway—lots of movies have protagonists with one vice, why not make one where the he has every vice?

I emphasize the fragmentary nature of Bad Lieutenant, but it does actually have a sort of rudimentary story, which was based on a real 1981 incident. A young, pretty nun is viciously raped by two young thugs, and the investigation is thwarted by the nun’s refusal to give police any information about her assailants. Yet Ferrara—who always was half exploitation filmmaker, half would-be Pasolini—is barely interested in the investigation’s dramatic potential. What matters to him is the nun’s Christ-like feat of forgiveness, which Keitel has such a hard time believing yet is clearly inspired by—if such utter scum can be forgiven, there may still be hope for him. This leads to some wincingly cheesy Jesus apparitions, but what’s more memorable are the actions it prompts in Keitel, ramping up to a brilliantly stark, poetic finale.

Abel Ferrara

Lion’s Gate’s new special edition of Bad Lieutenant features a rambling but frequently informative commentary track by Ferrara and cinematographer Ken Kelsch. It also features a superb half-hour documentary about the making of the film, which is something in itself: the guerilla tactics of the shooting sound truly insane; Christopher Walken, who’d just starred in Ferrara’s King of New York (90), was originally slated to play the lead, but dropped out because he didn’t think he could deliver; fellow actor Victor Argo had to convince Keitel to do the role, and Keitel was apparently going through some severe personal turmoil that fed his performance. Yet for all the chaos in both its content and genesis Bad Lieutenant survives as something sharp, focused and brutal, direct and rigorous. It deserves to be seen again, and not just by the faithful.

On the losing end: Denis Johnson's Nobody Move

Nowhere in Nobody Move (Harper Collins, $24.99) are we ever told how Jimmy Luntz ended up singing in a barbershop choir. It’s mise en scène as mystery, the way Denis Johnson uses a seemingly natural penchant for crafting narratives riddled with ellipses to keep his characters from behaving the way people in books are supposed to, from sitting still long enough for us to crack them fully open and facilitate this thing we call identification. But even if the singing thing is left dangling, we do know that Luntz’s dominant vocation is actually gambling, even if he displays only slightly more skill in this arena than in warming the cockles of pensioners with his harmonizing skills. We’re even given a little story that helps to illuminate the formative roots of Luntz’s gambling habit, told by Luntz himself at the precise moment when it seems he’s about to have his testicles downsized and eaten by his captors. As a kid Luntz was once offered an impressive sum of money to clean a man’s trailer, which he went about with great diligence over a four-day period. When the job was finished he was told he could either take the promised payment or accept a single lottery ticket. He takes the ticket. Do I need to tell you the result?

I know of no losers in fiction quite like Denis Johnson’s losers, a fascinatingly pathetic species as elegantly exemplified by Jimmy Luntz as by Bill Houston, who features prominently both in Johnson’s Angels (83) and Tree of Smoke (07), or the young man identified only as Fuckhead in Johnson’s story collection Jesus’ Son (92). Early on in Nobody Move Luntz neglects his chance to kill someone who will surely kill him. Now in a position in which he’d be wise to appear as inconspicuous as possible, he then checks in to an all-log motel, soaking wet, with no car, no socks and paying in cash. Besides the gambling and singing, we’re also informed that Luntz was once a boxer for a couple of years. “Clumsy in the ring, he distinguished himself the wrong way—the only boy to get knocked out twice. He’d spent two years at it. His secret was that he’d never, before or after, felt so comfortable or so at home as when lying on his back and listening to the far-off music of the referee’s ten-count.” That music is of course as much Johnson’s as anything heard in real life that could have possibly served as a muse. An author of poetry as well as fiction, he’s our preeminent clown-lyricist of the also-rans—who also stumble, break a limb and ruin someone’s year before realizing they actually have no idea where the finish line is.

Tree of Smoke was the book everyone was waiting for Johnson to write—his admirers and detractors alike. A sprawling, unruly, multi-character novel than span the arc of America’s misadventures in Vietnam, it couldn’t help but announce itself as a flawed masterpiece designed to dazzle readers of a certain sensibility and set rolling the eyes of others. It scooped the National Book Award. Anyway, I loved it. Nobody Move is a peculiar successor, the book probably no one was waiting for Johnson to write, a mercilessly taut little comic thriller originally written as a serial for Playboy and as seemingly slight as Tree of Smoke was inherently profound. And it is a hoot, at once managing to deliver the genre goods and defining even more clearly the author’s signature style, themes and characters. If you’ve never read Denis Johnson, and you’ve got a soft spot for crime fiction, it makes a very fun introduction.

So Luntz is picked up by Gambol, who’s collecting for Juarez, from whom Luntz borrowed money, which was quickly lost while gambling. In a scene that’s never even described, Luntz shoots Gambol in the leg and steals his Cadillac, which will change hands many times over the course of the story. Luntz will then meet Anita, a delicious soon-to-be divorcee who also happens to be accused of embezzling a couple of million dollars. She makes her very memorable entrance into Nobody Move by getting plastered at a matinee of a boxing flick—perhaps the product of a childhood fascination with John Dillinger, Johnson seems to really like having criminals enter movie theatres to do things other than watch movies—then signing her divorce papers, then going to some quiet spot by the river to practice shooting her gun at jars full of metal. Later on she pees on her mobile phone. I was in love with her before she even met Luntz. And then he falls in love with her. Or anyway he’s at the very least blissfully astonished that a woman so good-looking is willing to accompany him back to his log motel. She makes love, Luntz observes, “like a drunken nun.” I have no idea how Luntz would formulate such a conclusion but it does indeed sound exciting.

Though Johnson continually inserts little curve balls of expository enigma—I especially liked it when he made note of a dream Gambol has where he’s skiing naked—the action and escalation of tension never let up. Which is to say nobody stops moving in Nobody Move, trapped as the entire cast of characters is in a closed circuit of comeuppance that can only be broken by accident, submission or, much more likely, agonizing death. Johnson’s humanism typically reveals itself through the discovery of some fragile sort of grace arising within the nadir of personal disaster. This sort of redemption is less present here, but there is in all this a kind of meditation on the nature of luck, though what it finally seems to point to is a strong suspicion that every time anybody gets lucky it can be traced back to some design, however fumbling that design may have been conceived. And this tension between the random and the predetermined is reflected in the architecture of the novel itself, which seems always ready to fall apart yet never does. It’s a trick that Johnson’s become a truly deft hand at. I can’t wait to see how he pulls it off next time around.

High-minded themes fall disappointingly flat In Delgo... not that anyone noticed

With their natural resources evaporating, the winged Nohrins immigrated to Jhamora, the country long settled by the lizard-like, mystically inclined Lockni, and were initially welcomed warmly. But the Nohrins got greedy and took more than their share and things got ugly, ending only when the Nohrin evil schemer Sedessa was banished to some awful place inhabited by gargoyle-like creatures with digestion problems. All this is relayed in the swiftly paced prelude to Delgo and, though parallels to real life histories of colonialism—including recent misadventures in the Middle East—are admirably conveyed, the deluge of exposition may prove a bit much for the little ones to absorb. Me, I had more trouble keeping the goofy names straight. Who comes up with this stuff?

The exploration of the perils of empire, the inclusion of a character with a gambling addiction, and the forbidden interracial romance that drives the narrative give Delgo some nice, timely shading, but I’m not certain if that all these efforts finally play out to any great effect. The first third intrigues well enough, but once the action starts the character development essentially stops and there’s an awful lot of over-long fights and chases that lack excitement. It doesn’t help that several characters are drearily flat, while potentially more dynamic characters are either shelved early on or suffer deeply uninspired vocal performances from the Freddie Prinze, Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt or especially Chris Kattan, who voices the hero’s grating fop sidekick.

The best thing in Delgo is in fact the worst thing in Delgo, at least in moral terms, which is to say the villain predictably steals the show. Anne Bancroft may have died three and a half years ago, but her sultry voice makes one final and highly pleasurable contribution here as Sedessa, by far the most eroticized creature on display in this otherwise largely neutered fantasy realm. In one scene she slinks about in a crimson, skin-tight, crushed velvet dress and some sort of corset, or at least a push-up bra. In another she dons thigh-high boots and ass-hugging pants. She uses her sexuality to mystify and manipulate those whom she figures can advance her plot to provoke a new war between the Nohrins and Lockni on false terms in yet another unspoken link to the invasion of Iraq. Again, I wonder how much a six-year-old will respond to such undertones, but for parents a little taste of Mrs. Robinson should help to pass the time.

As I post this I've just learned that Delgo now possesses the unhappy distinction of having experienced the worst wide release opening ever, earning only half a million bucks on over 2000 screens on its first weekend. Can't say I was shocked to learn this since I watched it in a theatre with one adults and two kids. It is by no means a great movie of any kind, but it makes you wonder just how hopeless it is trying to put a kid's cartoon out these days that doesn't have the stamp of Disney or one of its imprints on it.