Bringing Out the Dead
Bringing
Out the Dead:
drama.
Starring Nicolas Cage, Rosanna Arquette, John Goodman, Ving Rhames and
Tom Sizemore. Edited by Thelma Schoonmaker. Music by Elmer Bernstein.
Written by Paul Schrader. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Rated “R” Now
playing at Bay Area Theaters.
Posthoc
Rating: ** 1/2
I
wish there were great things to say about writer Paul Schrader and director
Martin Scorsese’s first collaboration together since The Last Temptation
of Christ. Since Scorsese may just be about the best director we
have and Schrader one of the best screenwriters, I expected Bringing
Out the Dead to set off the same ferocious fireworks ignited by
Taxi Driver, one of the greatest and most important films of our
time. But this film, while superbly intelligent, well-crafted and well
meaning, seems more like a muffled firecracker. Considering its milieu
and subject matter, that’s all the more puzzling.
Set on a full moon weekend in what Schrader has referred to as a fantasy New York of the 1990s, it follows the story of Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), a paramedic in the midst of a fiery burnout. Unlike the monstrous Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver, Frank is a decent guy who became a paramedic, he thinks, in order to save lives. “Saving someone’s life,” he tells us in the classically 40s-Style film Noir voice over, “is like falling in love.”
Except in Frank’s case, he hasn’t saved anyone’s in life in months. So there is no love in his life. Like someone who’s lost their God, he’s lost the reasons for doing what he does. He finds the disconnect between what he was trained to do and what he actually does unbearable. He feels useless and lost picking up homeless drunks, drug addicts and gang war victims like so much garbage. He’s as psychically damaged as the bodies he brings into the over-crowded, under-funded Sisters of Mercy Hospital (or “Sisters of Misery” as they call it) night after endless night. . He stays constantly drunk and shoots up the pharmaceuticals stored in his ambulance.
Furthermore, he’s haunted by visions of the ghost of a young 18- year-old girl whose death he accidentally caused some months previously. Before long the whole city is turning into one neon nightmare rife with hallucinatory images: a truck exploding out of nowhere and disappearing. An old man crawling into the path of his ambulance. A white stallion wandering through a homeless encampment. He finds it harder and harder to tease out reality. To tell the difference between right and wrong.
While rescuing an older man from a heart attack, Frank meets the old man’s daughter, Mary (Rosanna Arquette). It’s clear her father is never going to be much more than a vegetable, but Mary and her family stubbornly insist on keeping him alive. Good Catholics, they believe in miracles. Frank becomes attached to Mary. To him, she represents some stable place, an escape from the madness he lives through each night. This turns out be illusion too, when he discovers she’s a heroin user who hangs out at private club called the Oasis run by the smoothly sinister Cy Coates (Cliff Curtis).
The film, like Goodfellas and Taxi Driver is episodic in structure. We learn that Frank isn’t the only one ready to slide off the roof. All his co-workers are in danger of cracking up and each has a different way of dealing with it. Larry (John Goodman) can’t relate to Frank’s craziness at all and freezes him out with spontaneous naps. Marcus (Ving Rhames, who is excellent), pretends he’s on a religious mission and even revives a passed out heroin addict by leading the addict’s pals in an impromptu prayer session. Tom (Tom Sizemore) is part Travis Bickle, part John Wayne and part Dirty Harry, approaching his job with manic macho bravado that involves taking out his rage on the flotsam they’re charged with helping. And everyone expresses their frustrations in outrageous bursts of hilarious black humor. Yet, Schrader and Scorsese, a former Calvinist and Catholic respectively, refuse to judge any of them too harshly. For them forgiveness and understanding is all (It’s not often noted, but Scorsese is one of the few filmmakers I can think of whose concerns are profoundly religious ones).
Frank is so numbed out by the terrors he sees that he attempts to shock himself back to life, in the same way he applies the defibrillators to his patients to shock their hearts. He craves not only some real sense of justification for what he does, but also some genuine human feeling that his relationship with Mary represents and that his job prevents.
Eventually, he learns his sense of self-sacrifice is misguided. “No one asked you to suffer,” the girl’s ghost tells him at the end. “That was your idea.” Frank Pierce, haunted by the spirit of someone who wanted to live, finds himself responding to and understanding those who want to die. He learns that the real point of what he does is not to “save lives”, but to be what he terms “a mop of grief” for those he finds on his nighttime rides. And to relieve suffering whenever and wherever he can. Bringing the mercy of death is an act of compassion, too.
But despite all this, despite Scorsese’s signature energy, originality, flamboyance and feeling for grand hallucinogenic images, despite Thelma Schoonmaker’s dynamically perfect editing and the best efforts of a fine cast, Bringing Out the Dead feels as slack and numb as the drug addicts crowding its frames. As the film is told entirely through Frank’s desperate point of view, this may be the cause of the flatness I experienced. Seeing life through the eyes of a burnout risks engendering the same feeling in the audience. Much of the dialogue and many of the scenes are uproariously funny, but beyond that it’s hard to detect a pulse underneath the skin. Some of the peripheral street scenes seem slack and under- rehearsed, lacking the feral urban charge of Scorsese’s previous journeys down New York’s mean streets.
Part of the problem may also lie with Nicolas Cage. I’ve always preferred his comic performances to his dramatic ones and he seems to come up short on the drama here. I felt no sense of horror at what was happening to him, no dread of what might happen next. Especially when he turns from wanting to help people to actually wanting to kill them. Despite his bowed shoulders and haunted, sunken look like a ghoul yearning to return to his grave, his acting seems to come from the surface, instead of from within. He tries hard, but seems unable to turn himself inside out to get at Frank’s bruised and bedeviled soul and so we don’t share in his desperation the way Robert DeNiro gets us to share Travis Bickle’s psychosis in Taxi Driver.
Bringing Out the Dead is not a picture to shrug off, but unfortunately, that’s what I feel like doing here. While a second viewing would certainly reveal more, I still sense the patient would still be lying on the table barely breathing. This is one movie that really needs a defibrillator.
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