Bringing Out the Dead

We saw Martin Scorsese’s impressive Bringing out the Dead at a fancy Guild screening, where it didn’t seem to fully grab the audience. Were they unmoved by Nicolas Cage’s out-there performance?  We spent the movie trying to understand Cage’s character, without really identifying with him. The movie brims over with visual technique and editorial creativity, maybe too much of both. Yet it’s more ambitious and worthy than Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake. The script by Paul Schrader is one of his best.

Schrader and Scorsese turned Joe Connelly’s novel into the Apocalypse Now of movies about Ambulance medics — the hero works in a nightmare world and is plagued by guilty visions. His psychological problems manifest as bizarre visual effects.

Brilliantly-lit ‘scope visuals force us into a nighttime Manhattan that everyone describes as a Hellscape. Ambulance EMT Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) is close to a stress breakdown; he repeatedly hallucinates the face of a young woman that he couldn’t save, Rose (Cynthia Roman). Frank and his fellow EMTs wade through the carnage on the streets with little seeming effect: their must try to help patients with drug overdoses, gunshot victims, and impossibly filthy mental cases. None of the EMT’s follow the rules. Frank’s main partner Larry (John Goodman) is halfway sane, but Marcus (Ving Rhames) works evangelical fervor into his calls. Borderline psychotic EMT Tom Wolls (Tom Sizemore) acts gung-ho to do good work one minute, and then vents his rage on the ‘undeserving’ street crawlers. Frank is on the brink of nervous collapse. He needs a serious break, but has no sick time left. The ambulance dispatcher threatens to fire him for arriving late, but won’t let him quit. He can’t let Frank quit … nobody wants this horrendous job.

An especially dangerous brand of heroin is loose on the street. Frank tries to help Noel (Marc Anthony), a brain-damaged street person who is dangerous when flipped out on drugs. Noel makes so much noise, the harried emergency room people keep him sedated whenever he comes in. Frank’s heart goes out to Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette). Frank and Larry got her father into the ER alive, but the older man may be brain-dead. Mary is dealing with her own sense of guilt over a father she didn’t appreciate.

To keep going, Frank uses pills and alcohol. He keeps up a ‘Travis Bickle’- like voiceover commentary. The nighttime prowls begin to blur into near-fantasy territory. Frank can do his job, but everything else is an existential crisis. Is the effort to keep Mary’s father alive an immoral torment?   Mary is breaking down over the issue, and like everyone else, turning to drugs for comfort.

Frank and Marcus deliver twins from a Puerto Rican couple who insist that they are both virgins. The ecstatic Marcus praises the Lord and proudly announces that calls like that make everything worthwhile. But Frank has lost the ability to enjoy anything in the work, as he identifies too much with the misery of the patients. The most harrowing call is the aftermath of a shoot-out on a highrise. Drug pusher Cy Coates (Cliff Curtis) tried to leap to a lower balcony to escape, and impaled himself on a wrought-iron fence, as in Hitchcock’s  Spellbound. Frank has to hold Cy’s head while the firemen cut him free with a torch. The irony is that EMT’s aren’t supposed to discriminate when saving people. The loathsome Cy gets an undeserved second chance to live.

Paul Schrader’s screenplay carefully delineates the way the madness of The City makes everyone cynical, unreasonable, or insane. An ER nurse (Mary Beth Hurt) lectures delirious drug addicts as if they were Kindergartners. Her passive-aggressive rebukes play as pure sadism. The crush in the emergency room is a little bit like Chayefsky’s  The Hospital, but without that movie’s snarky attitude. Yet Frank is plagued by the same despair and panic: ‘We heal nothing, we cure nobody.’

Frank’s guilty visions are exacerbated by pills and alcohol. He remains stuck in professional-existential torment, convinced he’s failing at everything. That makes Bringing Out the Dead another Paul Schrader script derived from Robert Bresson’s  Diary of a Country Priest. The nightmare streets provide a context not far removed from Schrader and Scorsese’s own Bresson-derived  Taxi Driver.  Instead of Bernard Herrmann’s overwhelming music score, the soundtrack is a fracture minefield of disturbing cues, source music, and tones that seemingly emanate from Frank’s tortured brain. We’re even aware of the buzzing of fluorescent lights.

It’s an Hallucinatory Phantasmagoria.Nine years earlier in  Goodfellas, Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker’s jarring editorial tricks made us feel the manic paranoia of a coked-up criminal speeding in a car, convinced he’s going to be caught. For Bringing Out the Dead Scorsese uses a full cinematic toolkit to build Frank’s subjective nightmare. His warped perceptions are expressed through radical film speed manipulations, weird exposures, and lighting that isolates individuals. Shots jerk forward as if jolted by neurons snapping in Frank’s head.

The key effect comes when Frank keeps hallucinating the victim Rose in the faces of random people, accusing him of not saving her. Just as the fancy CGI effect wears out its welcome, it only gets more intense, with multiple ‘Roses’ in a single shot. But another powerful effect brings in a spiritual, supernatural eerieness appropriate for a Mario Bava horror movie: Frank hallucinates that all the victims that died on his watch are just under the city streets, and by pulling on their hands he can save them all. He’s experiencing his own private  J’accuse fantasy.

Scorsese had everything he needed on this show — it reportedly filmed for a full 70 nights on Manhattan streets. It’s hard to see where he went wrong, as the action is fast and jarring, and the characters vivid, as if seen through a barbituate haze. The sound design is particularly complex. I didn’t follow the career of Nicolas Cage very closely — there were periods when many of his performances were slammed as crazy, over-the-top. Yet he’s still a favorite. His eccentric nasal-voiced teenager in the movie Peggy Sue Got Married works extremely well for us.

Perhaps audiences found Bringing Out the Dead a mite too serious?  Not five minutes in we begin to notice a pattern of Catholic – Christian symbolism about sin and redemption. The iron rail incident vaguely reminds us of Stigmata, or the agony of a Saint. An image at the finale recreates the Pietà — but after Frank has done something we don’t necessarily agree with. Frank’s ordeal would not seem to have a specific ‘Catholic’ lesson, as in several Graham Greene novels.

This story naturally doesn’t have a lot of laughs. Only one scene really scores with humor, and that’s when Ving Rhames’ Marcus cons a group of zonked-out nightclubbers to pray for a friend that Frank is about to revive with Narcan. There’s so much misery to behold that Ving Rhames’ looney positivity wins us over.

Sean Beattie has a good faith-sensitive appraisal of Bringing Out the Dead at Talk Film Society. It has some spoilers, so beware.