Bringing Out the Dead reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Bearing Witness, Bringing Us to Life

Bringing Out the Dead

Pardon me for raving—well, that is half the title of this series—but it has been a long, long time since anything in a movie theater has moved me quite as much as Martin Scorcese’s Bringing Out the Dead. And that film hangs on a make-or-break performance by Nicholas Cage, who just may be on his way to being the most talented screen actor of his generation. The life of emergency medical technician Frank Pierce, the character he plays in this film, is threatened twice, and I was so captivated by Cage’s performance that I grabbed the arm of the seat I was in and gasped audibly… both times. Pierce says that when something good happens, everything glows. Well, look for the shine, because something very good has happened: this film! Bringing Out the Dead, with script by Paul Schrader (who teamed with Scorcese on 1976’s Taxi Driver), based on a novel by real life EMT Joe Connelly, lacks a story with a neatly structured beginning, middle, and end. Instead, it is a montage of scenes and episodes that sketch the boundaries of the life of EMT Pierce who, at the beginning of the film, is already pretty far down in the pits, but not so far that the only way is up.

If you can tell which way is up. During a night of Jesus, booze, and blood, Pierce’s religious partner Marcus (Ving Rhames) says that "The first step is love, and the second is mercy." That seems clear cut, but in the wacky world of these walking dead, nothing is clear. Very near the beginning of the film, a dreadful dread-locked street person Noel (Marc Anthony) is tied to a stretcher begging for water. Now, why won’t anyone give him a drink? Because water may kill him. Later, he can be coaxed back to the hospital only by the promise of a "termination room" where he can choose how he wants to commit suicide. Even later, the true act of mercy, of healing, involves Pierce’s taking on the medical identity of a dying man and letting him die naturally. So much for maintaining professional distance.

There’s not much distance in this film, with Frank Pierce’s death and life spiritual quest confined to the hell of the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan’s west midtown. He has sacrificed a marriage to his job, which gives him the chance for something that he compares to being in love, saving lives. But he has not saved anyone in months. We are very much on the mean streets of Taxi Driver—the meaningless sex and violence viewed through the windshield of a vehicle that keeps its driver away from anywhere more so than taking him somewhere. The difference is that Travis, the taxi driver, was a killer. Frank is a healer, a healer in need of healing himself. Frank’s partners do him no good, give him no answers. He doesn’t accept Marcus’s religious message anymore than Larry’s (John Goodman) dream of being his own boss in the suburbs. He yields to the adrenaline addiction of his third partner Tom (Tom Sizemore) but pulls back when he sees what Tom has done.

Then there is Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette, in real life Mrs. Nicholas Cage), daughter of one of the barely living that Frank brings to the emergency room. A sometimes drug addict who has not spoken to her father in three years, she waits around the hellish hospital, where she and Frank continue to run into each other, sharing cigarettes, pizza, and pain. In many ways, this film reminds me of Cage’s previous outing, Eight Millimeter, but there is a significant difference. While private eye Tom’s relationship with his wife (Catherine Keener) provided a moral ruler with which he could measure his walk on the wild side, the relationship with Mary just never comes alive enough to leave us feeling that she is the healer Frank needs.

This is territory Martin Scorcese knows and enriches with a surprising humor. He moves along from soul-numbing moment to soul-numbing moment, working against redemption, but redemption is always there. The film captures New York City as it has rarely been seen. Usually New York scenes are crowded, claustrophobic, but here the streets stretch wide and empty, punctuated by a couple of hookers here, a fight there. While sex and violence are never far beneath the surface, they nonetheless stay pretty much beneath the surface, and the film’s R rating seems to be more for theme and mood than for much that is explicit.

This is a film ultimately about love and a film made with love. But Scorcese makes a few crucial mistakes. He is working with an effective script and has the high-powered Nicholas Cage on screen almost all of the film’s 121 minutes, yet Scorcese seems to trust neither. He piles on distracting high-speed ambulance drives, weird lighting, and MTV nuttiness to convey Frank’s deteriorating state, when all he needs is a close-up of his main actor. There is a magical moment when Frank cradles a character impaled on a cast-iron railing fourteen floors above New York’s dirty pavements, and the character starts to babble about the city, the beauty, perhaps the glow that Cage’s character has already spoken of. That is quite enough, but as the welders begin cutting through the railing, the sparks suddenly become fireworks, and I felt embarrassed for such a misstep by such a great filmmaker.

Two films ago, in City of Angels (a sad rip-off of the quirkily magnificent or magnificently quirky Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders) Cage portrayed an angel who trades his wings for a human heart. In his two films since then, Eight Millimeter and now Bringing Out the Dead, he seems to be developing that theme, playing a good man who for love or mercy sinks low into the conundrum of evil in search of the salvation of love. In Eight Millimeter, he was admirably restrained, so that when he let himself go for a few moments that still give me goose bumps, he burned up the screen. In the new film, he starts off so far gone that he has almost nowhere left to go to develop his character, but what I said in the first paragraph still stands: he just may be on his way to being the most talented screen actor of his generation. He has an almost telepathic connection with an audience that transcends any movement or gesture on his part.

Twice in this film Frank Pierce, Cage’s character, speaks of "bearing witness" for those who have died, almost in the sense in which Holocaust survivors speak of bearing witness, to keep the dead alive in memory. For me, the best films have a quality of bearing witness, and as a reviewer, I would much rather bear witness for those films that have touched me than indulge what I’m told is my talent for spotting and dismantling absurdities. Since I review only one film a week, I try to do enough research to pick a film that I can write a positive review of, so that I can bear witness for something good. Of course, there is every once in a while a film that challenges me to tell you that the emperor (like the leading lady) has no clothes on. And, of course, sometimes I go into a film with high hopes and find that I’m stuck in a disaster.

But, as much time as I spend watching films (some of which never get reviewed here) and reading, thinking, and writing about them, these reviews, like my favorite films, ultimately are about love—my love for the complex human experience of watching, enjoying, and discussing film. Lord Buckley, the great comedian-philosopher, used to ask his audience if it would embarrass them if he told them that he loved them. Embarrassing or not, let me ask a favor of you. As you pay your money and take your chances at the megaplex, your dry feet sticking to the floor of the theater, your heart full of noble thoughts, and your wallet a few bills lighter, remember there is a love, at least our shared love for film, that motivates me to write these reviews.