Release Date: October 22, 1999
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore, Marc Anthony
Directed by: Martin Scorcese
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (gritty violent content, drug use, language)
As both Martin Scorcese and Nicolas Cage undoubtedly know, there is such a thing as going up to the line without going over it. Mr. Cage went over the line with the grisly and sadistic 8MM, but walked it in the astonishingly introspective Leaving Las Vegas. Mr. Scorcese went over the line with the interminable Kundun, but walked it with the dark truth of the insider's perspective in Casino. It's good to see, then, that both star and director have learned their lessons when crafting the thriller Bringing Out the Dead, an enormously successful bout with macabre humor and shady wit. This film is neither boring nor gruesome.
For the most part, that is. Occasionally, Scorcese will call on a lengthy segment of exposition that dampens the movie's plot more than it accentuates. And occasionally, Scorcese will call on a bit of graphic imagery (inescapable, perhaps, given our hero is a paramedic, and to his credit, the director deals with this baggage very tastefully). But through it all, the director and the cast maintain a sardonic, darkly humorous tone that helps the audience to wade through this picture's bloody nature. As Hollywood has dutifully learned, the presentation is everything.
In this case, Nicolas Cage is a distrubed, insomniac New York City paramedic named Frank Pierce, and his weekend tour of the Big Apple's off-hours is the movie's plot. Scorcese gives it to us in a style that's a cross between Michael Crichton and David Fincher, inserting placards to denote the different days. This tactic of signposting helps the audience keep a handle on the passage of time, for quite often the horrifying setting can defy linear limits.
Throughout the breadth of the weekend, Cage is paired with three different partners, all of which have a specific effect on him. Initially, he travels with Larry (John Goodman), the most sane and reasonable of the three; midway through he does a stint with Marcus (Ving Rhames' best mix of gospel and soul); and he wraps things up with the masochistic Tom Walls (a bug-eyed Tom Sizemore). Strangely, Cage plays Frank with an inversely proportional amount of sanity - he seems most uncomfortable with the placid likes of his first partner, but he seems to take comfort in the crazy baseball-bat antics of his last ambulance-mate.
Each of the three has something to offer, though, as do the injured or afflicted civilians that Frank encounters along the way. Early on he retrieves an old man suffering from cardiac arrest, and finds release in trading cigarettes with the patient's daughter, Mary (Patricia Arquette). The love story that results is a stretch, though not unlikely. Far better is the comic offerings of the supporting paramedics: Larry, even in his calm, takes a jaded outlook on life; Marcus' turn as a prophetic Barry White is laughable in its own right; and the cockeyed view of Tom Walls is humorous in its insanity.
The only downtime comes when our EMT heroes have to get out of the ambulance, either to deal with a patient or drop him off at the hospital. It's then that the breakneck speed of the film, similar to that of its quasi-star, the ambulance, slows down for poorly-executed conversations. Patricia Arquette is the worst of the bunch, whose wooden performance causes the rest of the cast to suffer; her recent turn in the religious thriller Stigmata could have been hidden, but here it is inescapable. Cage offers up the same tormented heroics as in Leaving Las Vegas, but as a reprint they're merely good and not great.
Perhaps the fault for this misstep lies in the Paul Schrader script (known most recently for penning the critically-acclaimed character study Affliction), but blame could be doled out to Martin Scorcese as well. Both writer and director should have sought to avoid the dullness of these anticlimactic periods, either by styling them into the ambulance chases or tossing a few of them out.
Nevertheless, Bringing Out the Dead is a picture that is hard to argue against, especially given its casual tone. It wants the viewer to like it, inevitably pulling out all the stops and even offering up a theme on the stark nature of life and death. Understand that there's no greatness here, but just a lot of good.
all contents © 1999 Craig Roush