Sleaze is soulful to Abel Ferrara, and this hardcore spiral, one of the most indelible visions of a contemporary purgatory, is among the fullest manifestations of the spiritual unrest that's permeated his feel for urban rot since The Driller Killer. Sodom here is the New York City of blood-splattered car hijacks and crackhead dens; Harvey Keitel, the nameless eponymous cop, is first seen inhaling blow moments after dropping the kids off at school, crucifix dangling from rearview mirror in the foreground. He shakes down convenience store robbers for drug money, shoots a hole into his radio and abuses every substance known to man, all a good day's work -- a long take out of Warhol frames a protracted heroin mainline, his nodding off scored to the off-screen vampiric monologue of Keitel's stringy junkie mate (Zoë Lund, co-screenwriter and Ferrara's unforgettable Ms. 45 lady). Piss-drunk Keitel slow-dancing with two gals while Johnny Ace pledges his love on the soundtrack is a Mean Streets quote, and Ferrara's gutbucket detailing makes Scorsese's own Catholic anguish seem timid, though in the end the movie is closer to Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, another exercise in debauched transcendentalism -- Ferrara's world is as debased as Peckinpah's, and redemption is just as self-destructive. Coke is snorted off his young daughter's communion snapshots, as the lieutenant's mother-in-law, white-maned, sunken-faced, materializes in the room -- to the patron sinner, every spiritual stir must be degraded, so that Keitel's first glimpse of the raped nun (Frankie Torn) segues into his obscene mime show with the two party-gals, itself followed by his ambling into the desecrated altar. Religious guilt cannot be denied, though, and the lieutenant's incomprehension for the nun's forgiveness towards her violators culminates in the literalization of her advice ("Talk to Jesus"), with Keitel's galvanic one-man show of spewing, howling and crying for forgiveness to a sudden vision of Christ. His final act is as recklessly self-lacerating as the running bookie-gambling motif, but Ferrara knows it makes all the difference, and, fittingly, he fashions the concluding scene-of-crime drive-by into a tableau of squalid holiness. With Victor Argo, Paul Calderon, and Paul Hipp.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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