October 21–28, 1999

movie shorts

Bringing Out the Dead

Directed by Martin Scorsese
A Touchstone Pictures release

A car speeds down rain-slickened New York streets. A lone figure’s eyes fill the screen. They are haunted, desperate, as is as his voice on the soundtrack, a voice which tells us he is searching for redemption only to find streets full of violence and decay.

If that sounds like the beginning of Taxi Driver, it should. But it’s actually a description of Bringing Out the Dead, which like Taxi Driver was written by Paul Schrader and directed by Martin Scorsese. It’s been a quarter century since Scorsese, Schrader and Robert DeNiro brought life to Travis Bickle, and like Travis, Bringing Out the Dead’s Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) has a job that brings him into contact with the worst the city has to offer. But instead of a mute witness, Frank, a paramedic, is tasked with saving these lost souls — or at least watching them die.

Like Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club, Frank can’t sleep, but in Frank’s case it’s because he’s haunted, bedeviled by the ghosts of every patient he’s ever lost. As he tells it, being a paramedic is a series of highs and lows: "Saving someone’s life is like falling in love. God has passed through you — why deny it? — for a moment there, you were God." Frank doesn’t tell us what losing someone is like, but you can see it in his eyes, in his unshaven face, in the way he hits the bottle every chance he gets. He’s desperate to get fired, but afraid to quit: He can’t shake the need for one more high.

Into all this comes Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette), the daughter of a cardiac arrest victim whom Frank brings in at the beginning of the movie. As Mary’s father lurks on life support throughout the film — has Frank saved him or not? — Frank and Mary pursue a relationship whose plausibility is not helped by Arquette’s flat performance. (Scorsese usually brings out the best in his actors; if this is Arquette’s best, God help her.) What’s at stake is what’s usually at stake in a Scorsese/Schrader production: redemption, salvation, rebirth.

Bringing Out the Dead lifts not just from Taxi Driver but from his other work as well. Try the way he smothers every scene in music, appropriate or not — a tender scene between Frank and Mary is incongruously scored to 10,000 Maniacs’ "These Are Days," which is so happily upbeat its usage comes across as some sort of bizarre joke. Then there’s Schrader’s familiar reliance on bludgeoning Catholic symbolism, like the pregnant Latina who gives birth to twins, one stillborn and the other healthy. She swears she’s never had sex, and her name is Maria. Or take the fact that the story begins on Friday and ends on Sunday: Just call it The Passion of Frank Pierce. In a dream sequence set to the bizarre "I Am the Japanese Sandman," Scorsese even cops a bit of the "Rubber Biscuit" scene from Mean Streets.

Artists develop the same themes from work to work, and there’s nothing wrong with a filmmaker repeating his motifs. But Scorsese seems increasingly in danger of disappearing into his own tics, of repeating himself without adding anything new. The resurrection and abasement motifs of Bringing Out the Dead seem deployed as if by rote: Scorsese just seems to be using them because that’s what he’s known for. The only one of his pictures that’s broken free in recent years is The Age of Innocence, which grafted his usual themes onto a radically different setting, and thus forced Scorsese to rethink them. (Kundun, also a radical change of pace, merely came off as empty and grandiose, because Scorsese lost his connection to the material.) In Bringing Out the Dead, everything seems a little bit off, from Cage’s stuck-in-high-gear performance to Robert Richardson’s monotonously showy camerawork. Only Ving Rhames busts through the muck, as a fellow paramedic who’s part hard liver and part Jesus freak. But lively as he is, Rhames isn’t enough to revive a movie that’s badly in need of saving.

—Sam Adams