‘Bad Lieutenant’ or “He’s Not The Messiah; He’s a Very Naughty Boy!”
Harvey Keitel’s nameless character in Abel Ferrara’s ‘Bad Lieutenant’ (1992) is a very bad lieutenant but an exceptionally good junkie: he swears at his kids on the drive to school because he needs his next cocaine hit; he swipes drugs from a crime scene to sell back to dealers on the street; he consumes every drug under the sun and in vast quantities; he does zero police-work but drinks himself to oblivion with hookers or pulls over two young girls and uses his detective status to sexually assault them. He is a very bad lieutenant indeed and utterly self-destructive (the hardest person to police, after all, is ourselves although, hopefully, most of us do a much better job than this guy).
When a nun is brutally raped in a church it appears to be the act to snap this lapsed Catholic out of his self-destructive trajectory. But the nun forgives her attackers, an act that seems to shock Keitel more than the rape — if these two slime-balls can be forgiven then why can’t he?
There isn’t a plot as such to the movie rather than a character study of a man who self-destructed years ago and, essentially, almost doesn’t exist anymore. There is nothing left except the habits and is possibly the reason he has no name. There is a rolling-bet on a football game going on that acts as a sort of ticking clock to Keitel’s inevitable reckoning but, apart from that, it’s watching a vortex of self-loathing for 90 minutes.
What makes ‘Bad Lieutenant’ watchable (or even bearable) is Keitel’s performance which is harrowing in its bravery and willingness to be fully exposed, much like a sinner before God, and this film is about forgiveness and addiction (Ferrara himself was raised a Catholic and had drug problems while shooting this so who, exactly, is this film about?). Keitel’s profanity-riddled, Job-like questioning of Christ in church plays out like a grungy, foul-mouthed excerpt from Malick’s ‘The Tree of Life’ (“Where were you… motherfucker?”). He is desperate for salvation. At one point he stands naked in a hotel room, his arms outstretched. He resembles the image of the crucified Christ but he is actually a crying child holding his arms out to be loved; only there is nothing there to comfort him but the void. What the hell happened to this guy in the past? Or is he just dealing with original sin in a highly unoriginal way?
Ultimately he attempts to emulate the nun’s capacity for forgiveness, the very forgiveness he craves for himself, yet is this only a futile gesture (it being nothing more than a gesture?) that will lead to annihilation? The nun’s redemption was through love and Christ whereas with Keitel’s it seems through desperation and guilt.
Ferrara films it all in a documentary style and is completely non-judgemental, possibly because the director knows we can’t help but judge the horribleness we are being shown. It’s also not a surprise that Ferrera would go on to make ‘Pasolini’ years later as there are recurring themes throughout both films.
‘Bad Lieutenant’ is an exhausting, yet oddly cleansing, watch and if you can handle the darkness it is worth it for Keitel alone. It never once feels like a performance, just a harrowing cry from the point where it is impossible to sink any further.
