Bad Lieutenant

SHOCKER MOCKER

For too many years friends have been yakking about Bad Lieutenant in much the same way they’ve been yakking about Pulp Fiction. They’re agog over Harvey Keitel’s boozer-drug addict cop. Their excitement reflects their belief most cops are either fascists or scumbags, or both. When a rogue cop is also portrayed as a vaguely bitter Catholic obsessed with sleazy sex, these fiends start panting. They’re Ken Russellites in need of a fix; a hosing down might be more beneficial. Bad Lieutenant belongs to the shocker-mocker genre, which is the catch-all for movies, because of one outrage or a dozen, have stepped over someone else’s line. Separating these pictures from the mainstream is they’re enveloped by “cool” mock: few if any conventions are off limits and the more sacred the cows scorned—especially Roman Catholic dogma—the better the panters like it. Sanctioning our worst suspicions about law enforcement, Bad Lieutenant hasn’t much of a purpose beyond titillation. The print ads for the movie confirm this: Harvey Keitel’s nude torso attracts the beery-paunched raincoat & sunglasses crowds. They’ll sense the NC-17 rating will provide some vicarious thrills; they’ll rightly guess Keitel will deliver full frontally; they’ll get to see this cop shooting and snorting up, freebasing and hallucinating. They also know Keitel, in his 40s when he made this movie, is as close to the personification of America’s urban white male scariness as any actor we’ve got; no one has been able to predict what he’ll do next. Central to our response to him—we like his explosive edginess. Yet he’s very predictable here, defeated even before he gets going: supposedly drug-fatigued at the start of the movie, he doesn’t provide much juice, there are no moments when he enters the danger zone, when the cocaine might infuse him with manic energy and behavior. Nothing frightening about him, either; in fact, we feel nothing. So what if he shoots out his car radio because he doesn’t like the score of a baseball game he’s gambled his way to bankruptcy on? Three quarters of the way through, when it’s clear the pop morality being hinted at just ain’t cutting it, director Abel Ferrara decides Keitel has to react to a rape of a nun. What’s he reacting to? The assault? A bad drug trip? (It’s a combo.) When the nun starts purple-prosing—“I ought to have turned bitter semen into fertile sperm”—I damn near booed. And Keitel’s last act of yowling redemption—it’s total bull shit. A given his character is a long-term druggie, yet why does he look in such great shape at the beginning? Did he take the weekend off from his ruinous drug routine and work out? As the movie progresses, he becomes more drug-bloated, but there are times when he looks uncomfortably close to Robert De Niro’s Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. There are even bits when you can hardly distinguish between them and the only way you know it’s Keitel is his mole is on the left side his face. After the movie ended, I watched the predominantly male audience hurriedly put on sunglasses—but the sun wasn’t out. Unlikely the janitors found any prophylactics because the faces on the crowd seemed pretty disappointed, as Bad Lieutenant doesn’t deliver on its NC-17 promises; its shocks and mocks practice safe sex. Our porno & scandal saturated society gets more hypocritical and insecure by the hour: t & a, splattered innards, cult massacres, terrorist bombings and celebrity murder trials get PG-13, R and high Nielsen ratings, but male genitals are still a no-no. Does the rating stand for Not Convincing for anyone over 17?

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com