Rescue Dawn

Rescue Dawn is the film that is loosely based on Dieter Dengler's experiences as a prisoner of war in Laos in 1966.  Dengler published a book back in 1983, Escape From Laos, that probably tells basically the same story, but this film is primarily inspired by the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly.  Werner Herzog directed both Rescue Dawn and Little Dieter... and found Dengler's story so compelling that he found two very different ways to tell it.

The plot is a simple one.  Dengler (Christian Bale) is an American pilot in the mid-1960s that has a bombing mission over Laos.  He gets shot down, which was especially bad in Laos because the US wasn't supposed to be there at all; that essentially means that the US government would not be using diplomacy to get the POWs in Laos home, because the US didn't officially have troops there.  Yes, I know...it sucks to be Dieter Dengler (and not just because of the name).  Dengler is captured by men affiliated with Pathet Lao, which is approximately the Laotian version of the Viet Cong in Vietnam.  When he was initially captured, Dengler was given the chance to denounce the United States by signing a pre-written letter in exchange for leniency; Dengler refused to denounce his country and was sent to a prison camp.  The camp is guarded by a relative handful of men (maybe fifteen or so) and there are six POWs, including Dengler.  Dengler instigates an escape plan, but that's really the small picture.  Even if the POWs escape, they have a dense jungle filled with disease, enemies, and precious little nutrition surrounding them on all sides.  How are they supposed to be rescued from there?

For a movie about POWs, this movie spends relatively little time in the prison camp.  A decent-sized chunk of the story takes place there, to be sure, but I would estimate that less than half of the film is set in the camp.  That really puts a lot of the focus on Christian Bale to carry this picture, which he does, often with extended periods with minimal dialogue.  I don't consider Bale an explosive or overwhelmingly great actor; I think he approaches his roles methodically and tries to pay attention to the details.  In this regard, he does a great job.  His mannerisms, from the way he behaves in the jungle at the beginning and end of the film to the way he eats his worms and grubs in the prison camp, feel authentic.  He certainly looks like someone who spent time as a POW; he lost over 50 pounds to play this part.

Bale wasn't the only actor to lose weight for this movie; Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies lost 40 and 33 pounds, respectively.  Both actors turn in good performances here.  Zahn is primarily known as a comedic actor, but he does a good job as the POW that is the least depressed and deluded when Dengler arrives.  As such, he becomes Dengler's partner in crime and shares a lot of screen time with Christian Bale.  Personally, I like Zahn best when he is stretching himself (Happy, Texas and Out of Sight are good examples of Zahn's talent for layered comedic roles), and playing an ordinary man in an extraordinary circumstance is a refreshing change of pace from his typical buddy comedy fare.  Davies has a lot of fun playing the delusional member of the group, insisting that diplomacy was the only way back to the US and he would rather ruin an escape attempt than risk his diplomatic rescue.  Davies' character is interesting because it gives an unexpected source of conflict that produces some unusual results.  The rest of the supporting cast is solid, but not particularly noteworthy.  The Pathet Lao appeared to be mostly evil, which may be an oversimplification, but was probably a valid point of view coming from a POW.

Despite the lengthy periods with limited dialogue, Herzog does a good job keeping the suspense and danger in place.  This could be a film that tries to convey the exhaustion that Dengler experienced, but Herzog wisely chose to compress time and focus on immediate threats whenever possible.  The cinematography is good and there are no truly weird moments, which makes this the most viewer-friendly film Herzog has directed to date.  There has been some dispute over how true this "true story" is; the family of Davies' character has set up a website that attacks the film's accuracy in general and the portrayal of Jeremy Davies' character in particular.  While I have no doubt that Herzog changed some aspects of the story to make a more suitable narrative, I find myself pretty indifferent to complaints of inaccuracy.  Herzog claims the sole writing credit for the movie (despite the fact that Dengler wrote his own book about his experiences), which tells me right away that he chose to change some plot elements for dramatic purposes.  As long as Dengler didn't get a writing credit and the movie is not promoted as a biopic, that's okay by me.  My main problem with the film has to do with the plot; by spending so much time out of the prison camp, the immediacy of the escape is diluted.  That is a necessary problem, given the story, but the escape wasn't as cathartic as it should have been.

This is a move that is difficult to break down into individual components because it really is a cumulative effect.  The ways that each character reacts to their stressors might be unexpected at times, but it is logical, which is difficult for a director to pull off.  The physical work the actors put into their roles combines with an unusually restrained directorial effort from Herzog to make the best POW war movie since The Bridge Over the River Kwai.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

I don't often say this.  It actually hurts me to type this.  Nicolas Cage is totally over-the-top overacting in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans, and he is super-awesome because of it.  Ugh.  I think I need a shower now, I feel so dirty.


Rarely does a film's quality rest so heavily on one actor, but this movie (oddly enough, not a sequel of any kind to the 1992 Harvey Keitel vehicle, Bad Lieutenant) is completely dependent on Cage.  Sure, the supporting cast here is pretty solid, but that's just icing on the cake.  Fairuza Balk shows up for a few minutes and plays against type by not being a goth chick for once.  Eva Mendes plays Cage's junkie hooker girlfriend about as well as you would expect her to (she's pretty and can memorize lines).  Alvin Joiner (AKA rapper Xzibit) does a better than average job as a scary drug lord, but I think the real revelation for him is why he needed a rap pseudonym in the first place.  Isn't "Alvin" tough enough?  I find it hard to believe that misspelling something that belongs in a museum is much tougher than a rascally chipmunk.  Tom Bower is fine as Cage's AA-bound father, but it's his beer-swilling wife that is the surprise.  Jennifer Coolidge (Stifler's mom in the American Pie movies) makes a surprisingly unglamorous appearance as Cage's step-mom; she actually turns in a pretty good dramatic performance here, but my immediate reaction was to how appropriately haggard she looks.  Val Kilmer has a small but key supporting role and, miraculously, does it well and doesn't try to out-overact Cage.

All that is inconsequential, though.  This is the story of Terence McDonagh (Nic Cage), a police officer in New Orleans.  The movie takes place shortly after Hurricane Katrina, although it doesn't mention the disaster much after the first scene.  That first scene is important for two reasons, though.  First, it explains why this New Orleans movie is not about Mardi Gras.  Second, McDonagh hurts his back in this scene and the result is a permanent injury that even McDonagh's doctor admits will not be completely helped by pain medication.  That serves as the justification for this character to seek out any relief he can from the pain, be it drugs (marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and crack), sex (with his hooker girlfriend or a civilian in lieu of arrest), or gambling (often and poorly). In the middle of all this vice, there is a homicide case that McDonagh is supposed to be solving.  The funny thing about this cop movie is that the case is really secondary to the character.  As a viewer, you are never really drawn into the details of the crime because McDonagh treats it like a job, not an obsession (rare in movie cops).  This film shows McDonagh doing absolutely everything wrong until the walls all start closing in on him.  He doesn't stop, mind you.  His mounting gambling debts are starting to creep into his professional life, his addictions have caused him to act in ways that get Internal Affairs actively interested in taking his badge, he has opted to sell information to drug dealers that are willing to kill him, and his vice-sharing girlfriend decides to clean up her life and stop using drugs.  The only question is what will be the first part of his life to ruin him?

Now, that sounds like a really depressing movie, but it's not.  Sure, the back injury can be seen as a justification for McDonaugh's actions, but this film never makes excuses for his behavior.  As such, this is not a story with a moral, and that makes all the difference.  Instead, director Werner Herzog must have asked Nic Cage if he wanted to pretend to be out-of-his-mind-crazy on film for two hours.  Never one to turn down the opportunity to overact, Cage obliged.  It's a good thing he did, too, because Cage is a treat here.  He's weird, though.  He walks around with a hunched back throughout the film.  He throws out some truly bizarre laughs out of nowhere.  He makes you think that Johnny Depp should have studied him for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, THAT'S how drugged up Cage acts.  Cage's performance isn't seen through his own druggy lens, though; instead of seeing how McDonaugh sees the world while high, we see how high the world sees McDonaugh.  Well, that's true for most of the movie.  There is a scene where Herzog allows Cage's drug use to subtly affect how he interprets a TV broadcast.  There's another, less subtle scene where Cage hallucinates iguanas and the camera assumes the point of view of an iguana for about two minutes.  Regardless of the point of view, Cage turns in one of the best performances of his career and

It's difficult to describe an actor acting high without sounding like you should have been an extra in Dazed and Confused.  Imagine The Shield if Michael Chiklis was in-orbit-high.  That's the best parallel for this film that I can draw for you.  There's a lot of gritty crime stuff going wrong and McDonaugh is obviously crazy and deserves to be jailed for his many, many indiscretions, but then you see a moment that shows what an awesome police officer he is.  Or another moment that shows how horrifying it can be to have someone this twisted in a position of power.  Those moments are what make this film hang together.  There's a scene toward the end of the film where Val Kilmer's character shows that he might actually be, in some ways, worse than Cage as an officer of the law.  You'll notice that the movie poster doesn't include "The" in the title; it looks like a clue that, as bad as Cage's character is, he's not the bad lieutenant.  He's just one of many.