Bringing Out The Dead

The first time I saw Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead I thought a brilliant re-visitation to the world of Taxi Driver (1976), now re-framed as the ugly streets of late ‘80s New York, full of druggies, hookers, derelicts and crazies, seen this time through the eyes of a burnt-out paramedic played by Nicholas Cage.

Re-watching it many years later it seems tediously meretricious, almost ridiculous, a kind of Oliver Stone redoes Scrubs (the hit TV series that went to air in 2001 and ran a remarkable nine years). That’s not entirely fanciful as Stone’s regular cinematographer Robert Richardson lenses the film in Stone’s characteristic hyperkinetic style (and probably no more that coincidentally Judy Reyes who appears as the ICU nurse at the end of Scorsese’s film played Nurse Espinoza in Scrubs).

Clearly however that was not what Scorsese or his writer Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver) intended but the combination of Schrader’s heady-handed (at one point Patricia Arquette says with a straight-face to Nicholas Cage ‘If you’re not tough enough, these streets will kill ya") and reiterative script, the ongoing found-wanting comparison to Taxi Driver and Nicholas Cage’s phlegmatically maudlin performance all conspire to make this an enervating affair, flashy visuals and bluesy rock soundtrack nothwithstanding (or perhaps because of),

The story, adapted from a 1998 novel by Joe Connelly whose real career experiences we no doubt see compressed into three days, concerns Frank Pierce (Cage), a Travis Bickle-like ambulance driver complete with voice-over (perhaps fueled by his reading of Shelley and Italo Calvino amongst others) who after five years of scraping life’s casualties off the streets of New York only to see them return for more is starting to lose his mind in what is to him increasingly becoming a Boschean Hell. As he reluctantly goes about his business with partners John Goodman and then Tom Sizemore and Ving Rhames he has hallucinations of a teenage girl he failed to save and falls for the attractive daughter (Patricia Arquette (o whom Cage was married at the time) of a cardiac arrest patient he saved early in the film. The latter provides the only semblance of a narrative development the film has as over the course of three nights we are raced around Manhattan’s mean streets picking up drunks, O.D.s and shooting victims and hauling them back to a frenetic emergency department.

Scorsese is, of course, a master film-maker and he works his directorial chops here aided by his regular production designer, Dante Ferretti, but it is all too little effect.  With so little substance to engage with it is not surprisingly that the film flopped at the box office despite being critically well received and is now a largely overlooked work in the director’s canon. Time will tell if that is undeservedly so.

 

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