Face contorted in a bitter grimace, the nameless NYPD detective at the heart of Bad Lieutenant is an unhappy family man. In his fractured life, he barely maintains the outer form of his family as he descends into corruption and debauchery. The cracks are widening into chasms wide enough to engulf his soul. Is the bad cop, played Harvey Keitel, racing toward the fall or holding out for a chance of redemption?
The 1992 film will be out on DVD, July 28, in a special edition featuring commentary by writer-director Abel Ferrara and other features.
Bad Lieutenant was one of only a handful of NC-17 movies, and was so rated for graphic scenes of sexual violence and perversity. The explicitness detracts from the film’s potential for visual poetry. We could get the point without seeing so many imagination dulling incidents. Nevertheless, Bad Lieutenant is often beautifully filmed, awash in streams of light and deepening pools of shadow, a postmodern film noir in look and gritty story.
Keitel gives a memorably Method, wounded animal performance, channeling young Marlon Brando at his most agonized. Although he goes through the motions of police work, the lieutenant spends much of his time shooting dope and smoking crack, stealing from thieves, shaking down girls for sex and placing big bets on the Mets and the Dodgers. Addicted to drugs, degrading sex and gambling, he is enslaved by demeaning habits and mounting debt while wrestling with a Catholic conscience. He is the cold sweat embodiment of a man in hell, bereft of faith if not belief, abandoned to desolation through his own acts. Choreographer Ken Kelsich’s sometimes wobbly, hung-over cameras capture the lieutenant’s shaky hold on life.
