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The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, Blake tells us. In Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara's new film, the road of excess leads to the Port Authority Bus Terminal off Times Square. The film is a fantasia of decomposition, a devil's parody of the Stations of the Cross as an NYC cop (Harvey Keitel) identified only by the allegorical moniker The Lieutenant--reduced, in the end credits, to LT--executes his itinerary of self-destruction.
He spends a lot of angry time in his car. The first such long take follows him and his two little sons on the way to school, as he ferociously berates them for letting their aunt hog the bathroom (this is one of the rare notes of home sounded in the film). The kids get out and Daddy does coke right by the school. This scene rhymes with the Lieutenant's final drive down from Spanish Harlem to Port Authority with two crackhead kids (same position in the car) whom he is, in a unique and hard-won moment of mercy, about to send to freedom and New Jersey instead of to prison--which is where they belong for raping a nun right on the altar and violating her as well with a crucifix, not to mention stealing a chalice full of hosts. The cop then drives to Madison Square Garden and his destiny, which we see in longshot with loose, random traffic a breaking up our view.
Between the two trips intervene--like, say, the Hell panels of Roger van der Weyden's Last Judgment--grotesque tableaux of the Lieutenant sampling a rich menu of sins. His "police activity" is an uninterrupted abuse of power: scoring coke, ripping off the black kids who have ripped off a Korean grocer. The coke is sex fuel: an orgy with two willing women is followed some time later by sexual degradation of two unwilling women--younger women, in another daddy's car, beside which LT stands masturbating in the rain. He is increasingly about arrogance and irresponsibility. His days--and the movie--are structured by a baseball playoff between the Mets and the L.A. Dodgers; he keeps upping his (anti-hometown) bet on the Dodgers until he winds up owing the Mob an impossible $120,000. Games 4-7 mark his decline, as radio talkshows about...