In Bloom: THE WHITE LOTUS

Writer-director Mike White knows wealth is a poison. The ways privilege infects a mind and soul has been the background hum of his work over the last decade, sometimes bubbling up to the surface. His two-season HBO comedy-drama Enlightened took a corporate exec and watched her spiral as she tried to put her life back together. His Beatriz at Dinner stranded a working-class Mexican-American masseuse at a client’s party where a bloviating racist mogul oozes non-stop Trumpian chatter. His Brad’s Status found a Ben Stiller of anxiety burbling out of a college tour that highlighted an aging man caught between the separation of the very wealthy from the merely well-off. But all this swirling interest in inequality and its effects, so well-attuned to the currents underlying whorls of outrage, finds a refinement and culmination in The White Lotus, a six-hour resort-set miniseries HBO finished airing tonight. (There’s already word it’ll get another season with a new location and new cast; here’s hoping it’ll be just as good.) This work is a reaction to and dissection of the prevailing culture of the time in a way that’s bleakly hilarious, simultaneously sympathetically observed and witheringly, pitilessly critical. It’s a low-simmer melodrama, even a tragedy in some of its dimensions, wrapped in a dazzling social comedy of manners and errors. There’s rot in this here resort, and it’s not the staff. We watch as the wealthy bring all their problems on vacation, and, if they leave with a step up to a better life, it’s often, whether they’re aware of it or not, on the backs of those they view as beneath them. In our economy, what’s trickling down from the one percent is the pitch black toxin of their privilege.

White sets up an ensemble of guests arriving at the eponymous Hawaiian resort, some more likable than others. There’s a Big Tech boss (Connie Britton), her insecure husband (Steve Zahn) and their two near-grown children (Sydney Sweeney and Fred Hechinger) with a friend (Brittany O’Grady). There’s a newlywed real estate heir (Jake Lacy) and wife (Alexandra Daddario). There’s a spacey, needy inscrutably wealthy (Jennifer Coolidge) with her mother’s ashes in tow. They show up hoping to get away from it all, but find they’ve brought their emotional issues and interpersonal melodramas with them. White stages their criss-crossing dilemmas with a great skill for juggling complications in rich juxtapositions that build up momentum and sharply timed shaping to each hour. No one plot thread gets more or less attention than feels exactly right.

Through the course of their days, relationships start to chafe. There’s something about a vacation that lets one really confront a traveling companion’s true self, who they really are when the quotidian day-to-day goes away. White sees how these awful people’s flaws are the reasons for their unhappiness. No wonder vacation is no perfect balm; they are the ones they need to escape. All they’ve done is bring their whirling problems—insecurities, jealousies, inadequacies—to rest among the locals and staff forced to put on a happy face and put up with them. We see the annoyance behind the Fawlty grins of the hotel manger (Murray Bartlett) and empathetic spa manager (Natasha Rothwell). They want to do their jobs well, but these guests sure make it difficult sometimes. There are unmistakable optics to these wealthy white privileged overgrown babies looking to be coddled—throwing tantrums about booking errors, or wandering listlessly in search of a drink, or validation—arriving on the shores of a tropical island with all the presumption of ownership.

It’s underlined by the teen’s friend admitting her college research is on colonialism. (Big topic, the dad shrugs.) The colonizer/colonized relationship not only isn’t dead, it’s here. We meet a native Hawaiian working at the resort (Kekoa Scott Kekumano) who says his family is fighting his place of employment in a land dispute. We see an employee strung along by a time-suck of a guest who dangles the prospect of funding her business idea. We see the hotel manager increasingly frazzled by the unrelenting demands of a blood-boilingly entitled guy’s inability to let a small problem go. This hotel is a paradise of astonishing views, sumptuously photographed in every crashing wave and painterly sunset, and it’s filled with the pettiest, shallowest, tunnel-visioned people. The ensemble is uniformly strong—biting off snappy lines and wallowing in self-loathing or despicable behavior, all the worse when it’s tossed off so casually as to not see the impact, even on their supposed loved ones. They’re too busy rushing off to the next sex, drugs, alcohol, conference call, spa treatment, or scuba training on their to-do list.

White writes the upstairs-downstairs dynamic with aplomb, clearly having great empathy for the genuine pain all parties find themselves in, while allowing the dialogue to sparkle and snap with the most laser-focused incisive satirical detail. He lets the truly loathsome distinguish themselves from the merely troubled with their own words—digging holes for others to fall into. Watch how a well-meaning person accidentally ruins a life; or a high-society mother (Molly Shannon) swoops in chanting about the benefits of money, money, money; or a seemingly good-intentioned offer becomes just another heartbreak when a new distraction comes along. In total, the six hours add up to a compelling piece of work, as hilarious as it is sad, as enraging and it is engaging. Even the score, a howling, near-hyperventilating pseudo-Hawaiian folk song theme that settles into lovely languors of classical music or tribal hymns, captures the uncertain mood. The season builds to a fevered finale in which agonies and ecstasies are approached and sometimes tipped over, and ends in a grand melancholy disappointment and a note of tenuous, fleeting near-hope. White sees the worst in his characters while also seeing the full complexity and context behind these qualities. He loves, and he loathes, sometimes at once. He transcends caricature to find real, complicated portraits of these particular people. He finds moments of grace, and moments of criticism, and moments when characters finally collide in inevitable disagreements. And he understands the greater societal impact their flaws have. He watches as no matter what happens, these guests are free to go take their chaos elsewhere and leave others to pick up the consequences.

Sidelined: MASCOTS

Christopher Guest’s Mascots introduces us to plucky weirdos driven to get in big foam costumes and wiggle around to delight and excite a crowd. There’s a husband/wife team (Zach Woods and Sarah Baker) who play a turtle and an octopus for a low-rent baseball team, a chipper Brit hedgehog for a soccer team (Tom Bennett), a loopy arts’ college armadillo (Parker Posey), a football teams’ oversized plumber (Christopher Moynihan), and a grouchy Irishman (Chris O’Dowd) who dresses as a giant fist for hockey games. They’re all driven to find success, powering forward with boundless positivity and love of the game in the pursuit of a silly dream: the grand prize at an annual mascot convention. If this sounds like it’s falling into Guest’s formula, you’re correct. It’s another of his mockumentaries involving an affectionately teased subculture. But unlike his great earlier comedies and their targets, Waiting for Guffman’s community theater, Best in Show’s dog competition, and A Might Wind’s folk music revival, Mascots lacks crucial specificity. Trying too hard to whip up eccentricities, it’s a flat, dull attempt at resuscitating a form that’s past its sell-by date.

Superficially, Mascots has everything that made earlier Christopher Guest movies great. It has the subculture. It has the large ensemble of funny people, including many of the performers who populated Guest’s earlier works and some welcome additions. (Present and accounted for are Jennifer Coolidge, John Michael Higgins, Michael Hitchcock, Fred Willard, Bob Balaban, Jane Lynch, Ed Begley, Jr., and others.) It has the bright, flat mockumentary style allowing for the humor to loosely arrive at tossed-off lines. It’s has the casually ridiculous spoken with only a hint of bemusement and straight-faced silliness unfolding for an unemphatic camera. It’s agreeable. But, wow, is it not funny. Maybe it rises to the level of gently amusing from time to time, and the whole picture never quite tanks into something totally contemptible, but that’s certainly a far cry from the best Guest can do. This is his first movie in a decade, and the problem is partly what happened to the comedy landscape while he was away.

Firstly, the mainstream mockumentary style was more refreshing and novel when he took the form from the classic This is Spinal Tap, in which he co-starred, and applied it to his own silly trilogy. With Guffman and the rest, there was the spark of invention in seeing big, funny ensembles improvise their way to hilarious, endlessly quotable dialogue in scenes assembled with verite deadpan and plot pushed along by interviews with the characters. Now, after two versions of The Office, Parks & Rec, Modern Family, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and so on and so on, the style has been wrung out. Add to it Mascot’s half-heartedness with which it deploys the gimmick – with many scenes including cuts to impossible camera angles – and it just feels tired. Besides, at least those other mockumentaries were plausibly exaggerated looks at actual groups. The extrapolated and invented mascots and their rivalries and competitions here simply isn’t a culture with much connection to the real world. It’s not a parody of a real group of people; it’s simply goofing around based on a sliver of recognizable interest. (And if you think the plot is overfamiliar diminishing returns, wait’ll you see how Guest revives his memorable Corky St. Clair to flatlining results.)

Secondly, the improv style has also come to dominate the comedy film scene. From the Apatow productions – which expand their runtimes with long, loose scenes of characters cracking each other up – to every comedy that pauses its action for punchline roulettes in which the cast takes turns throwing out insults. (These have long stopped seeming like scenes and are more a matter of spitting a bunch of possible jokes and hoping one lands hard enough to excuse the rest. It’s coverage, not choices.) The shaggy scenes in which talented people find their way to a naturally funny bantering chemistry is no longer unfamiliar territory. And when it’s handled so carelessly as it is with Mascots it just feels sad. As a big fan of his earlier work, seeing Guest’s formula returning in such a diminished state is dispiriting. Sure, there are fleeting moments of good humor – like a hotel with a “John Wayne suite” downgrading a disappointed guest to the “Slim Pickens” – but there’s otherwise a desperation in scenes devoid of interest and missing laughs. I smiled a few times, chuckled a few more, but was otherwise thoroughly bummed out by how pale an echo of old favorites it is. Compared to other modern comedies, at least it’s not unendurable or ugly. It’s watchable. But the dead air is deafening.

One of Those Days: ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY

Judith Viorst’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is a classic picture book funny and smart in capturing the feel of a bad day from the point of view of a little boy. It cleverly portrays how a series of quotidian bummers – not getting the seat you like, or a prize in your cereal, or the dinner you’d hoped for – can snowball, making you grumpier by the minute until by bedtime you’re entirely wrung out. But the book’s only 32 pages, so in making a feature length live action adaptation screenwriter Rob Lieber has expanded a slim and simple idea into a widescreen sitcom plot, giving Alexander’s whole family a horrible, no good, etcetera, day, the better to make it through with a smile because of their love for each other.

It’s a nice message. The movie is a bright, sunny, largely inoffensive kids comedy that’s short – 81 minutes, including credits – sweet, and never particularly funny but at least agreeable in the way better live action Disney comedies can be. It’s broad, cute, and nice enough, idealized squeaky clean family foibles and slightly sharper frustrations around the edges. I suspect kids will enjoy the main character, who has been turned into a Wimpy Kid knockoff. Alexander (Ed Oxenbould, with awkward hair and a face stuck at the exact midpoint between child and teen) is a 12-year-old kid who is perpetually frazzled, scuffed, mussed, scattered. He’s well-intentioned but clumsy and easily frustrated with his lot in life. Things just don’t go his way. It’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days for him. And he’s sympathetic because of it.

The target audience is unlikely to read any reviews, let alone this one. And they certainly won’t care that it’s directed by Miguel Arteta who, with work on relationship semi-comedies like Cedar Rapids, Youth in Revolt, Chuck & Buck, and HBO’s gone-too-soon Enlightened, knows a thing or two about quickly and charmingly sketching relationships and histories between characters. He does his unassuming, pleasant thing here, quickly filling out the ranks of the family so that we feel we’re joining a fairly normal, busy, loving, upper-middle-class life in progress. There’s the stay-at-home dad (Steve Carell), children’s book editor mom (Jennifer Garner), cocky older brother (Dylan Minnette), drama queen sister (Kerris Dorsey), and infant brother (Elise and Zoey Vargas). We get the dynamics immediately. The way the family operates is clear, and, though they mean well, it’s easy to see how Alexander’s struggles can get lost in the shuffle.

He always seems to be having a bad day. Popular kids pick on him. He feels stupid next to his crush. His family members have successes to share around the dinner table while he just mopes and complains. He wishes they knew what it was like to have everything go wrong. Well, they soon do. Car troubles, job crises, medical emergencies, school issues, romantic confusion, scheduling difficulties, wild animals, and a variety of scatological concerns plague the family as the movie clunks through their day from one snag to the next. It’s never zany or farcical, just one fairly ordinary stumbling block after the next played up a notch and a half past normal. The escalating series of events is almost what you'd expect out of a bad day, but a bit more juvenile and movie-ish. The family gets to share the bad day feeling, and only grow closer together because of it.

I kept waiting for the movie to kick into a higher gear, generate a sustained funny sequence or string a few clever lines together. Nope. It’s at a modest even keel beginning to end. The cast is likable and makes a cute family unit. Every once in a while they’re joined by a funny actor (Megan Mullally, Jennifer Coolidge, Dick Van Dyke) who can deliver a half dozen so-so lines in a way that makes them mildly humorous. That’s nice, too. I mean, the whole thing’s sweet enough with only a few spiky moments of borderline off-color humor pinned in by the PG rating. (At one point Carell sighs, "Daddy wishes he could swear right now.") There’s genuine love and camaraderie in this family, and it’s the rare kids movie that acknowledges grown-up feelings and concerns, even if the movie’s too slight and minor to do anything with Carell and Garner's warm, comfortable performances. So it’s not a great comedy, but it has plenty of smiles and good vibes and will fit in perfectly between Dog with a Blog reruns some future weekend on the Disney Channel.

Lost in AUSTENLAND

Austenland is a film of affection for its inspirations, which happen to be the works of Jane Austen in general, but even more specifically the romantic comedy. It’s been ages since we’ve had a good one, so it makes a certain amount of sense that this film works as one by foregrounding its fictional status and thinking about locating your ideal romance squarely in the safe confines of literature. Based on the novel by Shannon Hale, who also co-wrote the screenplay, the film takes place at the titular Austenland, a resort that promises the ultimate Jane Austen experience. The owner (Jane Seymour) welcomes guests to spend time on the grounds of a richly appointed Regency Era home set on a large sweep of generous county acreage. The period wardrobe appears to be provided. It’s all so perfectly too-much and just-so, a tackiness that comes from an overabundance of frippery. Maybe it’s the small taxidermy farm animals scattered about that puts it over the top. To maintain the fictional illusion, the guests must abstain from all modern convenience (except for indoor plumbing, which is thankfully provided).

Our entry into this world is Jane Hayes, winningly played by Keri Russell. She’s an ordinary woman with a fine job and a string of bad breakups. Her apartment is covered in Austen merchandise, up to and including a banner over her bed that reads “Mrs. Darcy.” Unattached and with vacation time to spare, she jets off to England to visit Austenland and get lost in the literature she loves. Jane discovers that visitors to the resort come in different varieties. The other women attending this particular week are an uninhibited wealthy woman (Jennifer Coolidge), who seems to know little of Austen’s work, and a younger lady (Georgia King), so deep into character her real self barely surfaces at all. Deliberate caricatured, the guests are instantly recognizable as superfans. They may not have Jane’s merchandise, but they’re commitment to leaving modern day real world concerns behind is total. It’s not so strange. After all, it was none other than E. M. Forster who once wrote, “I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen.”

That Austen is a novelist who attracts a devoted following is not news. It’s a phenomenon that predates Colin Firth’s Darcy’s dip in the water by more than a century. She speaks so directly to the hearts and minds of her biggest fans, conjuring her characters with such matter-of-fact precision. She writes crisply and sparklingly with easy wit and pithy observation, sometimes both at once, “It is a truth universally acknowledged” and all that. To fans Austen is not just a Great Author. She is, in her capability to inspire in some of her readers the kind of zealous personal attachments we’d more often associate with, say, superhero superfans, a great author as friend. It’s no wonder that her biggest fans, on a first-name basis with good old Jane, seem to be able to disappear into her world again and again.

That’s what Austenland concerns itself with, as the three ladies take tea, ride horses, sketch, sew, sing, gossip, and dine. At the end of the week there will be a ball. All along, they interact with actors playing typically Austen types of men: a prickly Darcy (JJ Feild), a colonel (James Callis), a captain (Ricky Whittle), and an inebriated patriarch (Rupert Vansittart). For all the artifice, Jane finds herself drawn to the resort’s handyman (Bret McKenzie). The cast is universally charming. Russell is a fine, appealing, immensely likable center. We want what’s best for her. The others, from scene-stealer Coolidge to marvelously prickly Feild, create sparkling chemistry and fill in great supporting detail.

Jerusha Hess, who co-wrote Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, and Gentlemen Broncos with her husband Jared, directs Austenland with a light, confident touch. Her tableaus don’t grow stiff and awkward like in those earlier efforts, but rather pop with delightful detail. This is a film that’s sprightly. She stages the film’s unexpected complexities with ease. The world of the film is at once ridiculous and relatable, broad shtick with heart. She pushes the exaggerated characters and locale without losing the real emotions and warmth in it. The affection for the characters and for Austen is infectious, the details that make up the resort’s activities funny in unexpected ways. When the group trudges out to the fields for an old-fashioned quail hunt, it’s with matter-of-fact precision that the employees launch stuffed birds into the sky.

All along we dance through meta-layers of storytelling. Guests are acting and actors are acting, but all are aware of the artifice. And yet, the artifice itself can provoke very real emotions that can carry over into reality. That the film is interested in its premise and characters enough to actually consider all sides of the scenario is welcome and hilarious. Some guests find themselves romantically drawn to the actors, but are they drawn to the character or the real person underneath? In a nice touch, we eventually cut behind the curtain to see the actors themselves gossiping about the guests. Is it possible the artifice can be broken from their side as well? It’s a film thoroughly and literally scrambling concepts of reality and fiction in much the same way Austen superfans (or any superfans, for that matter) do when lost in a fictional world.

Austenland designs stories for its guests’ amusement in much the same way Austenland designs all of them for ours. This is a film that’s a breezy, warm comedy that’s light on its feet. It’s at once a loving spoof of Austen tropes and a loving embrace of her marvelous plotting and emotional stakes. But I’ve been making it sound weightier and trickier than it is. The film is a clear and bouncy comedy, filled with loud pop music and tickling asides. The mix of comic conventions eventually puts us near where Austen and rom-coms alike tend to, but the whole-hearted embrace of its every aspect is a total delight from beginning to end. It’s a film that can wink the whole time through and still in the end make one swoon, too.

Lukewarm Leftover Pie: AMERICAN REUNION

Isn’t it funny how the march of time turns even a slight teen sex comedy into a little cultural time capsule? In 1999, Paul and Chris Weitz’s American Pie was just a small movie that became an R-rated box office success, a movie of raunchiness tempered with just enough sweetness to make its gross-out gags go down. But now it’s 2012, and that late-90s debauchery has begun to feel just the slightest bit quaint. It’s no less vulgar, but somehow the period-specificity of it all – it’s definitely a dated movie – gives it the hazy distancing effect of the recent past. That’s why the simple fact of American Reunion gathering the entire original cast gains poignancy from its strong hit of 90s nostalgia and the inescapable aging of all involved, the audience included.

The conceit of Reunion is that the class of ’99 has yet to throw a class reunion and decides to rectify the oversight with a big bash. So, it’s the 13th-year reunion and the whole gang is back in town. The years since the first film, since the first two theatrical sequels and a number of barely-connected direct-to-DVD sequels, have left the characters older, but in many cases no wiser. The seemingly endless opening moments of the film painstakingly reintroduce them all and, though it’s nice to see some of these guys again, they aren’t exactly the Muppets in The Muppets. There’s so much stage setting as they’re getting ready to party like it’s 1999, the movie seems to be spinning its wheels.

We see Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) are having a bit of a dry spell in the intimacy department after the birth of their son. Oz (Chris Klein) is now a sportscaster who was recently voted off of a Dancing with the Stars knockoff. Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) seems to be happily married, Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) has been globetrotting, and Stifler (Seann William Scott) is just as crude, stupid, and aimless as ever. That’s not all. Vicky (Tara Reid), Heather (Mena Suvari), and Jessica (Natasha Lyonne) are all back as well. And, wouldn’t you know it, Jim’s dad (Eugene Levy, the long-suffering consistent cast member for the series) is a widower looking to date again. And Stifler’s mom (Jennifer Coolidge) sits in her upstairs hideaway, just as ever the embodiment of the first movie’s signature contribution to early-2000’s slang.

Now, if those names mean nothing, or next to nothing, to you, I doubt there’s a chance the movie will work in any way shape or form. If, on the other hand, you have any kind of affection for the series (mine only extends to parts of the first, but the others’ have their proponents as well, I suppose), it’ll in all likelihood be a predictable, but not entirely unpleasant, nostalgia trip. It’s just a shame the movie couldn’t be any better. It ends up in a satisfying place. The reunion itself is just the right touch of vulgarity and syrupiness and the characters end their feature-length encore with a pleasant enough curtain call. But there’s so much left unexplored and the way there is so juvenile, that in many ways the whole thing just seems tired.

There are all kinds of humiliations and misunderstandings leading up to the reunion that would be less of a stretch in a teen comedy. Here, in a movie about adults, this rampant immaturity is less excusable. Actually, there’s no excuse a movie about grown people should be this squeamish about sex, using the very idea of adult relationships as a gag in many scenes. In American Pie, this made sense. The characters were inexperienced, virginal teens obsessing about something that, for the most part, they could only imagine. But now, these characters are married or otherwise attached. They’re not teenagers. They’re in their thirties. To have them sneak into upstairs bedrooms, pull scatological pranks, and react to perfectly reasonable adult desires and urges with something approaching unfathomable panic and squirminess mixed with unseemly leering, is simply pushing past the realm of believability and likability.

To make this sequel all the more uneven, American Reunion flirts with the idea of becoming interested in exploring aging in a more meaningful way. There could be a good movie to make out of these characters – this generation – struggling to find their way in the world as adults, while trying to reconcile who they were as younger party people. The movie’s written and directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who last wrote a much better raunchy R-rated comedy about this very subject matter, the surprising A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, better than you’d think. But the Pie kids aren’t as lucky as Harold and Kumar. This movie nods towards a generation gap with the character of a hot 18-year-old girl-next-door (Ali Cobrin) only to literally turn her into a prop for a painfully belabored and largely unfunny sequence involving underage drinking and trespassing.

Hurwitz and Schlossberg shove in just-like-old-times embarrassment and raunch without aging the thematic concerns or even the gags to fit its older characters. This is a sloppily-executed franchise comedy with a few big laughs, a couple of fun cameos and a handful of nice callbacks to previous entries scattered amongst the dry patches of strained gags and sometimes-ugly undertones. I just wish it could have found an approach to its now-adult characters that respected the fact that they might now know just a little bit more about relationships (and anatomy) than when they were in high school. It’s a movie that trades off of its recognizability to a fault, weirdly unconcerned about making itself relevant or necessary.

Un-Caged: BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

The last several years have proven that there is a large market for bad Nicolas Cage thrillers. Remember National Treasure? Ghost Rider? Bangkok Dangerous? National Treasure: Book of Secrets? They all opened at the top of the box office charts on their opening weekend despite being largely terrible. For some reason, the general public will only see Cage if he has odd intensity and likably exaggerated mannerisms tied to a thin character wading through schlock. He’s a great actor though, so it’s a shame that his best projects have a tendency to slip through the cracks. In theory, that shouldn’t have happened to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is at once a very good sleazy thriller and a perfectly marketable film. Why, then, has the film seen only a small limited release and is now being limped out on DVD and Blu-ray? Maybe it’s because it happens to be so cheerfully wicked in its insanity.

Helmed by the great German auteur, and suspected crazy person, Werner Herzog, the movie features Cage as a New Orleans cop who injures his back saving a prisoner during Hurricane Katrina. This cop gets addicted to his painkillers and then starts to self-medicate in addition to his prescriptions by lifting some confiscated cocaine from the evidence room. Soon, he’s wandering the ravaged streets of New Orleans, lifting drugs off of unsuspecting addicts and snorting it right in front of them. He tortures and badgers witnesses and suspects, barks out orders, makes backroom deals and bargains, and generally looks at the world through a stare of vague, bug-eyed intensity.  Also, he’s investigating the brutal killings of an entire immigrant family.

Herzog and Cage don’t care much about making this man likable, or even relatable, but they aren’t following him down increasingly depraved paths like Abel Ferrara did with Harvey Keitel in their Bad Lieutenant (1992), a film that’s related to this one in name only. (The Bad Lieutenant part of the title was forced on the picture by a producer with the subtitle Herzog’s idea). Instead, Cage simply presents a man ravaged by circumstance and temperament, mirroring the locale. Herzog’s camera follows his central character through a crumbled and waterlogged city filled with slimy characters and creatures (including hallucinated iguanas and a twitching crocodile corpse), that match the decaying mental state of this bad lieutenant. New Orleans is a place of harsh beauty for Herzog as he uses his usual “voodoo of location” to great effect, not to mention skilful use of his beloved man-versus-wild imagery, not just in the iguanas and crocodiles, but also from the slimy snake the slips through dirty water in the opening scene and the film’s final shot with two men dwarfed by a sinisterly tranquil aquarium.

Often, a Herzog film will become more interesting the more it drifts away from the ostensible point of the scene.  Take, for example, his wonderful Antarctic documentary Encounters at the End of the World in which he places his narration over an interview to explain how lengthy and rambling the interview became. While Port of Call New Orleans remains a luxurious wallow in low genre pleasures and a seriously cracked procedural, there are plenty of excellent moments where the camera drifts away and maybe the plot will follow it. There are plenty of welcome detours, like the aforementioned iguanas that only Cage can see, and there are lots of rich parts for character actors. Jennifer Coolidge unexpectedly turns up playing Cage’s stepmom, but there are plenty of other strange and fascinating moments with a cast of characters that includes a drug dealer (Xzibit), Cage’s coworkers (which include Val Kilmer and Michael Shannon), and a prostitute (Eva Mendes).

This is a film of debauched anecdotes and bizarre incidents, of terrible criminals and sometimes worse officials. It plays like a conventional cop film that happens to be on about as many drugs as are in its main character. Herzog charges the film with his usual intensity of specificity and Cage brings a great performance of the kind that he is capable of delivering, but many recent roles have either misused or reined in. When you have two entertainers as eccentric, engaging and unpredictable as Cage and Herzog, it’s startling, maybe even a little disappointing, to see that, though they create a strange and captivating thriller, it seems to still pull up short. These are two men who could push each other so far over the top that the film would be in free fall. They only get us to the precipice, but what a lovely, beautifully schlocky view.