Port of Call: Herzog

Werner Herzog is a madman. This is a given, he makes mad movies, documentaries and narrative films about “mad men” – people who challenge nature and seriously jeopardize their sanity in the process, or sometimes just outsiders with warped visions and bizarre dreams. Cases in point: Fitzcarraldo, in which the title character tries to haul a steam ship over a mountain; Grizzly Man, a doc about a guy who spends his summers in the wilds of Alaska trying to commune with grizzly bears until one eats him; Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a doc about a pilot who was shot down during the Vietnam War; detained in a tortuous prison camp and made a seemingly impossible escape through the jungle; and Herzog’s own adaptation of that film. The filmmaker takes his audiences on adventure, whether it’s through the depths of the Amazon in Aguire: Wrath of God, or to an ice cave in the Antarctic in Encounters at the End of the World. I’ll watch anything he makes.

While I greatly admire The ‘zog’s quality, he also amazes with his quantity. This year he completed two features, which I saw back to back this week at the Toronto International film Festival.

First up: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, which was produced by David Lynch. Shot on video (mostly) in San Diego for under $10 million, the low-budget narrative is inspired by the story of college student and aspiring stage actor who, 30 years ago, stabbed his mother to death with an antique sword in order to save her from an impending “nuclear holocaust” (more details here). Creepy-looking character actor Michael Shannon is the unbalanced Brad McCullum, with Willem Dafoe as the cop trying to coax him out of his house after the crime. Chloë Sevigny plays Brad’s fiancé, Ingrid, who, along with a theatre director (played by my, erm, old buddy Udo Kier), tell of the events leading up to Brad murdering his overbearing mom. Brad Dourif also co-stars as Brad’s xenophobic ostrich farmer uncle.

Herzog? Lynch? All those weird character actors? Ostriches? Sounds like a party, right? More of a tragedy, actually. This isn’t so much of a movie as it is a contest between Lynch and Herzog to out-art each other, a character study that plays out in one nonsensical scene after another.

Aggravatingly, despite scene of Brad acting all loony toony, none of the people in his life seem to notice that he’s dangerously unstable until it’s too late. Along the way there are characteristically Herzogian scenes of animals running and Brad in the Peruvian jungle, where he starts to lose his mind after his dumb-ass hippie friends kill themselves kayaking during the rainy season. Then you’ve got Lynch’s surreal touch in scenes where the actors freeze, look at the camera or, in one instance, do a scene in which – for no reason – a midget in a suit stands in the forest (talk about self-parody). The filmmakers’ sensibilities come together in the unstable suburbanite Brad, and too much of the film meanders through scene after scene of him being disturbed, being profound and being profoundly disturbed. Once the point is made, though, My Son, My Son is an exercise in self-indulgence.

And it looks like crap. Shot on muddy video, aesthetically it’s almost as cheap as Lynch’s even more tedious 2006 fiasco Inland Empire. Would it have killed them to have Dafoe and Dourif race each other on ostriches just once in the film to spice things up?

But just as Herzog’s cinematic sense of adventure bites him in the ass, he does something even wilder that completely works. The second part of my Herzog double-header was Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans – a project that seemed like an April Fool’s Day gag when it was announced. The concept: German arthouse/documentary director Werner Herzog does a sort-of remake of a 1992 Abel Ferrara film best known for star Harvey Keitel’s full-frontal nightstick scene, but this time it stars Nicholas Cage…

Whut?

Believe it or not, te film actually exists in this dimension. And while My Son, My Son is one of the worst things I sat through at this year’s TIFF, Bad LT is one of the best. Herzog and Cage were in attendance for the premiere, and they explained that they always wanted to work together, and although the director didn’t want to use the title because the movie has little to do with the original, the film’s producer owned the moniker and insisted on it.

Cage, of course, has become one of those actors everyone loves to hate, mainly because for every quality small film he does, such as Vampire’s Kiss, Leaving Las Vegas or Adaptation, he’s made several unforgivably crappy Hollywood junkers, including the Gone in 60 Seconds remake, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The Wicker Man remake, National Treasure, Ghost Rider and Knowing. (Really, what kind of a jerk stars in those movies?) His performances are generally over-the-top and cartoonish. Plus, with his fake hair, cosmetic facial surgery and general lack of facial expressions, he’s basically a mannequin. (Indulge your dislike of Cage further here, if you dare – not safe for work.)

But then Herzog comes along like Oscar Goldman in the Six Million Dollar Man and rebuilds Cage into a machine. In BL, he stars as Terence McDonagh. Terence isn’t your garden variety cop-on-the-edge, though, he’s way off it, kicking his legs in the air like the Road Runner, waiting to plummet off the cliff. After injuring his back while saving a prisoner during the Katrina flood, he’s become a coke-snorting, weed smoking, pain pill-addicted car wreck with a drug-addict call girl for a girlfriend (played by Eva Mendes), a gambling debt, alcoholic stepmother (Jennifer Coolidge), penchant for blackmail and almost no respect for the law.

Despite this, he’s tasked with heading up a particularly brutal murder investigation. As he attempts to snare the prime suspects he stops sleeping, starts binging, crosses the mafia, loses a key witness, pisses off his co-workers (including a cop played by Val Kilmer), robs drugs from the evidence room, falls under investigation by internal affairs, sells info to a drug kingpin and even assaults a senior citizen.

Terence’s hallucinatory descent into a sleepless narcotics-fuelled orgy of depravity perfectly suits Cage’s bug-eyed, twitchy mannerisms and Herzog had him go for broke (he has remarked that Cage is his new Klaus Kinski, and similarities between Cage and the late star of Herzog films such as Aguirre is evident), improvising dialogue and harnessing that manic energy for laughs. The mix of cartoonish self-destruction and gritty crime drama actually works, especially when played out to a Cajun-flavoured soundtrack.

Add in appearances by My Son players Dourif, as a bookie, and Shannon, as a rookie cop, plus a strong performance from Xzibit as a drug kingpin, a steamin’ hot Fairuza Balk in lingerie, and some random shots of alligators and lizards, and it more than just works – it’s a cult classic in the making.

In the end it’s Cage, who rattles off so many memorable lines (“This is my lucky crack pipe. You don’t have a lucky crack pipe?”) while generally freaking out, that he’ll be quoted in dorm rooms for years to come. It took a madman like Werner Herzog to recognize the potential, harness that energy and use it for good this time. And while Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is a showcase for the title character becoming a wreck, I’m extra thankful that at no point are we forced to see Cage’s junk. Extra props for doing your own thing with the Bad Lieutenant story, Werner.

-Dave Alexander