Bringing Out The Dead
(1999)
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Martin Scorsese exhilaratingly adapts Joe Connelly's novel about Frank (Nicolas Cage), a paramedic working among the filth and mental desolation of New York City's Hell's Kitchen in the early 1990s. Lately he has been haunted by the visions of a beautiful 18-year-old girl whom he was unable to resuscitate. Soon after, another image begins to torment him, that of Mary (Patricia Arquette), a recovering drug addict who enters Frank's life when he attempts to save her father. His spiral into even further confusion is paralleled with his three driving partners: Larry (a boisterous John Goodman), whose advice to Frank is not to think about all the death and violence; Marcus (a scene-stealing Ving Rhames), a religious fanatic who uses his medical skills as propaganda for the Lord; and Walls (a maniacal Tom Sizemore), a loose cannon who has no sensible grounding whatsoever. In order to escape the madness that is consuming him, Frank asks, unsuccessfully, to be fired. He must ride out the nightmare, trying to redeem the lives of Rose, Mary, and himself in the process. Scorsese uses his camera to capture Frank's wavering mental state with tilted angles and fast-speed photography. In portraying the tormented Frank, Cage dives wholeheartedly into character, delivering another fiery performance. |
Martin Scorsese lends his customary intensity and visual razzle-dazzle to this 72-hour insight into the exhausting lives of New York paramedics. The director reunites with his Taxi Driver collaborator Paul Schrader to conjure up a powerful, blackly comic and often hallucinatory portrait of this most emotionally demanding of careers, while Nicolas Cage is perfectly cast as crumbling, sleep-deprived protagonist Frank Pierce. However, the other performances are so unhinged (mad medics Tom Sizemore and Ving Rhames especially), and the episodic encounters so overwrought, that the drama never really grabs as it should. Once again, though, Scorsese proves himself to be one of the most technically creative and thematically audacious film-makers on the planet.
Halliwell's Film Guide
Scorsese revisits familiar territory for him and his audience: hellish streets inhabited by low-life predators and victims; but his perspective has shifted from his customary petty gangsters and psychopaths to the good guys, however unbalanced they may se
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