director
Martin Scorsese
screenwriter
Paul Schrader
based on
the novel by
Joe Connelly
producers
Barbara De Fina
Scott Rudin
cinematographer
Robert Richardson
music
Elmer Bernstein
editor
Thelma Schoonmaker
cast
Nicolas Cage (Frank Pierce)
Patricia Arquette (Mary Burke)
John Goodman (Larry Verber)
Ving Rhames (Marcus)
Tom Sizemore (Major Tom)
Marc Anthony (Noel)
Mary Beth Hurt (Nurse Constance)
Cliff Curtis (Cy Coates)
Nestor Serrano (Dr. Hazmat)
Aida Turturro (Nurse Crupp)
Martin Scorsese (Dispatcher)
Queen Latifah (Dispatcher)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 121m
u.s.
release: 10/22/99
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
site
other martin
scorsese films
reviewed on this website:
- the
aviator
- casino
- gangs
of new york
- kundun
|
Frank
Pierce (Nicolas Cage), the frazzled city paramedic at the center
of Bringing Out the Dead, appears before us as a kind
of bleary-eyed Charon -- a ferryman transporting lost souls from
one end of Hell (dirty streets, crackhouses) to another (a hectic
hospital with no beds to spare). Frank's job is complicated by
the fact that this isn't just New York City; it's Martin Scorsese's
New York City, a hostile enchanted forest inhabited by wackos,
killers, whores, addicts, and, every now and then, an actual
normal person -- as endangered a species here as the spotted
owl.
Scorsese, renowned for his definitive New York portraits (Taxi
Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas), is solidly
in his element. He rarely puts a foot wrong here, and he goes
into Bringing Out the Dead with a restless eye and a playful
spirit. Visually, this is unquestionably the work of the Master
-- a speed-demon action painting of paranoia, guilt, adrenaline
-- but is it a masterpiece? Sadly, painfully, I have to say no.
Watching it, you feel like a cardiac-arrest patient, with Scorsese
working on you with a defibrillator: jolt, lull, jolt, lull --
he keeps pumping you full of electricity, and then he keeps losing
you.
This may be due to Joe Connelly's source novel (which I haven't
read), or it could be due to screenwriter Paul Schrader's workmanlike
adaptation. The reunion of Scorsese and Schrader on the insane
streets of New York promised something on the level of their
celebrated collaboration Taxi Driver. But that film emerged
whole and bleeding from Schrader's fractured psyche, whereas
here you don't feel much connection between Schrader and the
material. He understands exhaustion, endless nights, obsessional
guilt and shame, but he covered that in Taxi Driver and
several other movies. Come to think of it, so has Scorsese.
Central to Frank's torment is the ghost of a teenage girl, an
asthmatic he failed to save, who has been haunting him ever since,
in his dreams and now in waking life. She keeps turning up, and
after a while she seems less like an embodiment of guilt than
like a fancy literary device, a suggestion of the spiritual among
the physical grime and rot of the city. We never quite understand
why Frank is hung up on this particular girl; if he'd been emboldened
by recent successes and let his cockiness lead to negligence
that resulted in the girl's death, we'd go along with it, but
it's hard to know why he's plagued by this one failure and not
others as well.
Another device that seems intended to work better than it does:
a holy-fool addict (Marc Anthony), a dreadlocked, crazy-eyed
patient who turns up at least as often as the guilt-inducing
ghost. I suppose he's meant to stand for the unsaved lost souls
we've all turned our backs on. But he's generally irritating
to the point where you wish Frank would turn his back on him,
too. I would rather have seen more of Cy, a seductively mellow
drug dealer played with smooth precision by Cliff Curtis, and
there are some amusing brief characterizations: a barking supervisor
who refuses to fire Frank; a grim security guard posted outside
the hospital entrance; a cynical doctor who keeps telling repeat
patients things like "Why should we help you? You're just
gonna leave here and get drunk again"; sarcastic dispatchers
voiced by Queen Latifah and Scorsese himself (in his usual rapid-fire
mode, exhorting Frank to get going -- it's almost as if you're
hearing Scorsese telling his own movie to go faster).
Scorsese does his level best with the material; he cranks up
the volume, sends his camera into warp speed, and composes a
mood poem on the life of a paramedic. He pushes his actors to
extremes, getting some wildly funny bursts of madness from Nicolas
Cage, indulging guest loonies like food-obsessed Larry (John
Goodman), impromptu preacher Marcus (Ving Rhames), and borderline
psycho Major Tom (Tom Sizemore, easily and hilariously stealing
his scenes), all of whom serve as Frank's ambulance partners
during a long weekend. But whenever Scorsese builds momentum,
a scene comes up featuring Patricia Arquette as the morose daughter
of a cardiac-arrest patient Frank has saved, and the movie slams
on the brakes -- we jerk forward and wait impatiently for the
Arquette scenes to be over.
Perhaps Scorsese felt we needed the becalmed scenes of tentative
romance between Frank and the daughter (Cage and Arquette may
have fantastic chemistry in real life, but not on the screen)
to give us a break from the relentless forward riffing in the
ambulance sequences. After all, an entire movie as frenetic as
Ray Liotta's cocaine-cranked sequence near the end of GoodFellas
would wear us down after about an hour. But really, I wish Scorsese
and Schrader had had the courage to dump the romance aspect altogether
and stick with Frank's falling apart. However, without this subplot,
we would lose the best scene in the movie: Frank's final visit
to Arquette's ailing dad, a wordless scene that speaks eloquent
volumes.
It's been fascinating to follow Scorsese's explorations over
the past decade; he hasn't been content to repeat his gangster
successes too much, and even when an experiment doesn't quite
come off (The Age of Innocence, for instance, felt only
slightly more alive than your average Merchant-Ivory museum piece),
one still applauds the effort, enjoys the effortless technique.
Scorsese, as he approaches his twilight years, has begun to get
into pure cinema in a way that he perhaps couldn't as an angry
young man. Many Scorsese fans still haven't seen his previous
film, Kundun,
and those who did probably didn't care for it -- too slow, too
"boring" and uneventful. Yet I thought it was a triumph
-- a natural companion to The Last Temptation of Christ,
a painterly trance of a movie whose images and pacing were perfectly
true to the subject. It had no "story" to speak of,
but neither do a lot of classics hailed as pure cinema.
Similarly, Bringing Out the Dead is really more about
the marriage of image and sound than about the mundane and scattered
plot mechanics that Frank encounters. This time, however, Scorsese
is also married to a script that drags him down, keeps him from
taking wing as a pure artist. Anyone could have directed the
Cage/Arquette scenes; Scorsese just plugs them in there, dutifully.
Perhaps he needed a story that roved a little more, like After
Hours, which Bringing Out the Dead really resembles
more than Taxi Driver. He needed less Patricia Arquette
(her sister Rosanna sort of derailed After Hours, too)
and more weirdos, more subterranean life, more dark corners to
illuminate and explore.
Paradoxically, Bringing Out the Dead would be more pedestrian
if it weren't directed by Scorsese, who at 56 shows no signs
of diminishing energy; yet, because it is Scorsese, the pedestrian
parts jump out and slap us. We expect more from him, and from
Paul Schrader (whose adaptation of Affliction last year
was a fine and painful piece). Should we judge this movie against
Taxi Driver, or should we judge it against the usual Hollywood
tripe? Either way seems unfair. So, judging it as an isolated
work: terrific bit of directorial wizardry, but sometimes even
Scorsese isn't enough of an alchemist to make gold out of a lump
of coal. |
