Surprisingly Spiritual Films #2: Bad Lieutenant and Last Shot Redemption

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By Simon Augustine, Dr. Mal Sardonicus III and research by Lights! Editorial Staff

Abel Ferrara started his career as one of the directors you would leasts expect to make a serious-minded, even devout, Christian film. Ferrara, like fellow filmmaker Martin Scorsese, built his reputation with an oeuvre of gritty New York films centered on characters and lives that fluctuate between the polarities of selfish violence, on the one hand, and the moral instructions of a Catholic background on the other. Both directors were raised in New York and in the Catholic Church; in their characters, we see evidence of a creative mind working through both the dubious and redemptive influences of the religion with which they grew up (and partly escaped by going into the arts.) The men of Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Departed are rebels seduced by a life of crime and brutality who never fully escape living under the auspices of the Church. They endure lifelong shame, guilt, and ambivelant reverence in relation to the moral teachings of Christ. (Scorcese frames and ends Jake LaMotta’s story with a biblical passage, capped by the line “once I was blind and now I can see;” while his exploration of human weakness in the context of Jesus’ identity is tackled explicitly in The Last Temptation of Christ). Ferrara started out as a kind of low-rent version of Scorcese, making effective, garish exploitation fair like The Driller Killer and Ms. 45. These early efforts addressed the same urban wasteland as Scorcese classics like Taxi Driver (The Driller Killer features a deranged veteran and a roughly similar plotline), but favor cheap grindhouse thrills over depth or insight. Ms. 45 features a kind of female vigilante in the Death Wish mould: a mute woman is raped and then goes on a killing spree to exact revenge. In the finale, she dons a nun’s habit and stark red lipstick, a living embodiment of the whore/Madonna complex.

In Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, an actual nun is raped, during a vicious attack in the sanctuary of the church. She knows the two teenagers who committed the act, but in an almost transcendent act of forgiveness, in imitation of Christ, she refuses to give their identities to the police. She is determined to show her attackers the compassion they denied her; to, in her words, “turn bitter semen into fertile sperm.” Enter the title character, a cop who gives new meaning to the word corrupt as played by Harvey Keitel in a boundary-shattering performance. The Lieutenant is on a fierce and frightening fast track of self-destruction, and Keitel revived his career by playing the character with amazing commitment and abandon. The Lieutenant indulges a crack and heroin habit, steals from the criminals he should be capturing, and, perhaps most dangerous of all, is on an escalating losing streak with a series of reckless bets he places on Mets/Dodgers playoff games with a mobster bookie. Ferrara captures the heightened pulse and tension of a hot summer in New York, tracking The Lieutenant in his growing desperation, as he hangs out with drug dealers who look like vampiric ex-models, stumbles through the vacant halls of tenements and dark passages of dance clubs, and drives in his car screaming at Daryl Strawberry for ruining his latest wager. Keitel brings to life a man so tortured, so bent on self-annihilation, that some scenes nearly verge on black humor in their wild nihilism. Nearly, but not quite. In a memorable moment, Keitel – like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet – distills male libido into a numb, automated force of lust that is scary to behold: the Lieutenant makes two teenage girls goad him on as he masturbates in front of them, and they comply for fear of being caught taking a joy ride in Daddy’s car. Another scene has a thickly-muscled Keital standing naked in a stupor, high on crack and swigging down a bottle of liquor; one minute he prances grotesquely in a mock child’s dance, and in the next wails with an animal moan of existential exasperation. It is a performance of primal urges and frustrations, difficult to watch. If this movie has a signature sound, it is that wail.

The Lieutenant’s swath of destruction is interrupted only by the case of the raped nun, to which he is assigned. He questions her about the crime, and is befuddled and disturbed by her resistance to take revenge, but also affected by the purity and religious devotion of her refusal. This encounter with purer motives is the only thing seemingly able to penetrate the Lieutenant’s journey of hedonistic emptiness: it sparks a vision of Christ he has while slumped at the front of the church in which the nun was violated. The brief, surreal scene of the crucifixion that Ferrara inserts at this point is startling in its contrast to the urban realism otherwise dominant. Yet Ferrara does not exploit the image; it occurs with a surprising lack of ironic distance. Too often, filmmakers attempt to infuse unearned conceptual depth or emotional weight into a story by cynically throwing around religious imagery, with its myriad of connotations and historical power; a lazy aesthetic device intended to add cheap surrealism to a modern-day scene. The thinking goes: hey, throw a Virgin Mary over there, show the crucifixion here – and instantly you’ve got layers of meaning. You might call it the “MTV video approach” to religious iconography.

But, despite his grindhouse past, Ferrara is not going for cultural shock value here; the vision he shows us is an integral part of a story that takes spiritual redemption seriously and posits its possibility amidst the most sordid circumstances. The vision ends after the Lieutenant crawls between the pews toward the feet of the Savior, succinctly berating Jesus for His absence in the face of mortal suffering: “You fuck! Where were you?” When Keitel looks up, he is staring into the eyes of an elderly black congregant; and we are returned abruptly to hell-on-earth in the shape of Manhattan island. But the experience taps some goodness in The Lieutenant. Eventually, with some detective work, he tracks down the two Hispanic youths who raped the nun. But he doesn’t kill them; nor does he take them into custody. First, he sits down in an abandoned building and smokes crack with them. Then, in an unexpected act of compassion, inspired by the nun’s moral choice, he offers the criminals a last chance for redemption. We realize it is the Lieutenant’s only remaining chance for a measure of redemption himself, and he knows it. A dealer girlfriend (played by Zoe Lund, the co-screenwriter of Bad Lieutenant, who later actually died due to heroin use) practically foretells this revelatory deed; while preparing a heroin needle for him earlier in the film, she presciently comments: “Vampires are lucky, they can feed on others. We gotta eat away at ourselves. We gotta eat our legs to get the energy to walk. We gotta come, so we can go. We gotta suck ourselves off. We gotta eat away at ourselves til there’s nothing left but appetite. We give, and give and give crazy. Cause a gift that makes sense ain’t worth it. Jesus said seventy times seven. No one will ever understand why, why you did it. They’ll just forget about you tomorrow, but you gotta do it.”

He puts the boys on a bus headed out of the city, for what must be a one-way trip: It is a strangely moving scene, and the Lieutenant yells at them, in indefatigable Keitel fashion: “If you think you’re not getting on that bus, man, you’re dead wrong. Now get on that fucking bus, ’cause your life ain’t worth shit in this town!” As if sensing he needed to act quickly, that his time was due, the past catches up with The Lieutenant once and for all as soon as he leaves the bus station. Ferrara closes the story on a note that does not flinch from the human capability for baseness and indulgence; nor does it deny the power a religious tradition still retains to transform us through selflessness. Bad Lieutenant is a rare contemporary American film in that it wallows in the grimy, pulp details we associate with absorbing crime dramas – the drugs, violence, sexual threat, decadence of the soul entertain us in a grim fashion – yet all these sensational elements serve to set up a final twist, one not dependent on sensationalism but oddly plaintive and simple, in which a doomed man redeems what is left of his eroded soul with a single, anonymous act of kindness.

Posted by Lights! Editorial Staff on Feb 24 2010 Filed under On The Marquee, Our Feature Presentation, Suprisingly Spiritual. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry