Starring: Harvey Keitel, Victor Argo, Paul Calderone, Leonard Thomas, Stella Keitel.

By Jim Emerson

  
As the otherwise nameless title character in Abel Ferrara's NC-17-rated Bad Lieutenant, Harvey Keitel plays an NYPD detective who compulsively places outlandish bets he can't cover, sticks needles in his arm and shoots up, snorts coke seconds after dropping his kids off at school, cavorts nakedly and drunkenly with prostitutes and masturbates in front of teenage girls. Meanwhile, he's investigating the brutal rape of a nun.

The ads for Bad Lieutenant play up the movie's sordid, sensationalistic side (though why a strategically obscured full-frontal photo of a naked Harvey Keitel would be expected to help sell tickets, I really don't know). And if you're familiar with Ferrara's movies (Ms. 45, King of New York), you know that sleaze is certainly a major part of his sensibility. In its early scenes, Bad Lieutenant wallows in nightmare gutter scum along with its eponymous protagonist. The movie's portrayal of the Lieutenant's desperation and degradation is often horrifyingly (even sadistically) funny, as in a scene in which he attempts to lift a bag of cocaine from a crime scene; or another in which he is driving through midtown Manhattan, so fucked up and outraged over developments in a Mets-Dodger game on which he's placed a staggering bet that he takes out his piece and blasts away at his dashboard radio.

But Bad Lieutenant is more than just another look at that hackneyed "seamy underbelly" of urban American life. This is, in some ways, a devoutly Catholic movie about sin and redemption (well, aren't all Catholic movies about sin and redemption?). Keitel puts himself so far out there (and I'm not just talking about the full-frontal scene, which is probably the main reason for the NC-17 rating) that we actually start to feel there's something at stake (for humanity, perhaps) in what happens to this exceptionally awful guy. The title (there's no "The") is a straightforward description of the Lieutenant: He's a bad man, he does bad things, he has no redeeming qualities of compassion or sensitivity. He's just a bad lieutenant in every way. He's even a lousy cop -- and not just because he's a corrupt, whoring junkie.

But what finally pushes him over the edge is not drugs or sex or gambling or any of the other forms of corruption which have rotted the Lieutenant's soul. What drives him mad, and toward redemption, is the nun who was raped on the altar of her church by two young hoodlums: She has already forgiven her assailants and has no desire for "justice" or "retribution" or any of the concepts that drive, and give meaning to, the Lieutenant's personal and professional life.

Bad Lieutenant is bookended by howls of anguish from its title charater. The first comes when he's staggering around an apartment naked, bombed out of his mind, with the prostitutes. The Lieutenant is not a party guy: He gets no pleasure from his transgressions but seems driven by demons to abase himself as much as is humanly possible. The final cry of agony comes when he has to plumb the dark depths of his own soul to decide what to do about the punks who raped the nun. He can take the law (man's and God's) into his own hands by either blowing these sinners away, or by taking it upon himself to absolve them (thereby assuming the role of priest and confessor). It tears him apart to consider these options once he's tracked them down, but in his own twisted, confused and rather pathetic way he also sees them as possible paths out of the personal hell in which he's become mired. Bad Lieutenant ventures so deeply into its protagonist's head that we actually begin to understand the Lieutenant's desperate, convoluted spiritual logic as he assumes the lead role in his own hellish Passion Play.

The movie drags you down right along with the Lieutenant. I mean, you honestly can't help but get off a little on the movie's portrayal of this guy's no-holes-barred appetite for self-destruction. Watching him stick a needle in his arm may make you wince, but there's an illicit thrill to it, too. It isn't glamorous, or even pleasurable, but you can't turn away. The Lieutenant's life is like a car accident happening in slow motion: It's fascinating and ghastly.

With this and Reservoir Dogs under his belt, the long-underappreciated Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Duellists, The Last Temptation of Christ, Thelma & Louise) should finally get some of the recognition he deserves. So few actors would expose this kind of raw, emotional and physical nakedness. This is a harrowing performance that works on several levels at once: funny, appalling, moving. Bad Lieutenant is one of the best movies of the year, but it isn't easy. Neither, however, is the twisted road to redemption.

Back to screening room