Bedlam, but no Bethlehem What would this movie be without Harvey Keitel?It's so easy to see how this production could have gone terribly wrong.Just put Brad Depp in the lead role.There isn't a laugh in this story, and Keitel makes you believe that there isn't a laugh to be had in the entire world.His movements are sluggish, his voice an exhausted and perfunctory mumble.Except when he becomes agitated over the thought of winning money on a bet.His eyelids droop and his lips smack while a hooker puts on his tie and administers a mainliner, and afterward he slowly slumps over in his chair like a stroke victim.That scene alone, in its long takes, would have established him as a powerful performer if he weren't already recognized as one.In two other scenes he displays a hair-raising talent.The first is when he is drunk and crazed on some kind of unearthly dope with two women and we see him naked, standing in front of the camera, and he seems to rise on tiptoes, his tensed arms lift from his sides, his fingers fluttering, and his face becomes a grimace of tortured pleasure as he keens toward the ceiling.I've never seen anything quite like it.The second is even more gripping.Drunk, stoned, abject, he crawls into a church (his lapsed Catholicism has emerged only gradually during the story) and, muscular control disintegrating, he falls to his knees in the aisle and wails, howls, and ululates like a wounded animal, expressing his self loathing and accusing Christ of not helping him while at the same time beseeching his forgiveness and help.It's hard to imagine anyone doing this scene better.It brings to mind Cagney's outburst in the big house in White Heat.There are other scenes that are superficially more shocking -- the bad lieutenant whacking away as he coerces two naive New Jersey women into being naughty in front of him -- but Keitel plays the scene morosely, as if engaging in a biologically necessary but essentially uninterestingly quotidian act, something to be gotten out of the way.The film itself, alas, doesn't quite match the quality of Keitel's performance.There basically aren't any other important performances.The story is all Keitel's.There is no explanation of how he came to be the thoroughly rotten piece of moral filth that he has, but I'm not sure that's required.(Explanations for complex behavior tend to invite a certain glibness in writers: his Mom always preferred his brother, or his potty training was deficient or something.We really don't need his Rosebud.)The nun who is raped is preternaturally beautiful, a glowing creature almost grateful for the opportunity to forgive.She looks particularly radiant when naked.MY nuns were never like that!And, let's face facts, we didn't need an image of the living Christ appearing in the aisle of the church, especially since he looks like a skinny, long-haired, made-up actor.The black woman, into whom he changes, would have sufficed.The most confusing and maybe the weakest part of the movie is the lieutenant's idea of redemption.Is it a good deed when you finally corner the two unrepentant skunks who raped the nun, sit down on a couch and smoke some dope with them, give them stolen money, and put them on a bus to make a getaway?That's his idea of mimicking the nun and her forgiveness?What's to prevent these two nun rapists from giving yet another nun a chance to forgive them a month or two down the road?This is a bleak and tragic story, partly because after all is said and done, the lieutenant seems to have no idea of how to turn Bedlam back into Bethlehem.