Review of Bringing Out the Dead (1999) by Dave C — 03 Mar 2009

Frank Pierce's duty is to turn up at the aftermath of a violent incident, or a heart attack, never really in any pleasurable part of New York City, and take a crack at not only aid but encouragement. Frank is played by Nicolas Cage, first seen in the movie's opening closeup on his sleepless, disheartened eyes. Scorsese's Taxi Driver 23 years earlier opened identically. He coasts the avenues of Hell's Kitchen with a succession of cronies, in a three-day spell throughout which he floats in and out of sync with everyone else. He suffers delirious mirages of a homeless teenage girl whose life he fell sort of saving, for whose fatality he craves in vain to compensate. He gets shafted by his good intentions, finding patients who frantically want the kind of help he is powerless to give.

Cage's highly Scorsesean main character suffers terrified worry that he will in no time confront another life he cannot rescue, and starts trying to get sacked. Almost immediately, Cage connects with Patricia Arquette, exceptionally playing the daughter of a cardiac victim whom he saves early in the film, and who goes to see her father constantly at the hospital. Arquette approaches Cage regarding her empathy for others, which from our perspective urgently contrasts Cage's feelings of having exhausted his empathy, which is depicted strongly through the cynical throwaway gags that pepper the film with a callously funny sense of humor.

Like nearly every Scorsese movie, this descent through the stages in a nightmare shrewdly has no genuine plot, as the paramedic's days comprise no introduction or ending. On the contrary, their lives are an indeterminate state of wholesale dismay. A very big part of Scorsese's intention behind his entire filmography is to remind us that cinema can move us directly and intensely. Scorsese continually goes for broke. He makes movies that many other directors would be interested in making, only he makes them as well as they can be made.

Nicolas Cage is, or if he does not climb out of this bottomless hole of consecutive disasters I should say was, an actor of a magnificent variety and, because of the hilariously diffident earthiness that makes him so likable, he is rash and reckless when it comes to emotional ease of use. And thus, he will go as far as you need him to for a character, and this film is easily his best performance since Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas, which despite only having been made four years before was a long way down Cage's chronological filmography at this point. I like his lack of any real inborn ardor, which makes him seem less cultivated than an actor should be, which is not true. Because of his removedness, he just does not have a problem doing a wide range of different movies in spite of their quality. In Bringing Out the Dead, one of Scorsese's few and later films that breaks from his pattern of troubled anti- heroes on behalf of a dramatic hero journey, Cage personifies the heartbreak of a person who makes indispensable effort in the world and is proficient, but in a job that is by no means ever done.