Bringing Out the Dead: night and the city
In movies about surveillance--say, End of Violence, Enemy of the State--the question quickly becomes Who watches the watchers. Similarly, with crooked cop shows (Bad Lieutenant, among others), the question takes the form of Who enforces the law for the enforcers. It makes sense then that Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, a movie about paramedics, would have as its central question Who saves the 'savers.' But if it were that simple, it wouldn't be much of a movie, so Scorsese problematizes it, makes these paramedics hardly worth saving. These are guys who cruise the streets looking for people to beat up, guys who, through drinking and driving and a whole host of other infractions, routinely endanger the safety of the people they're supposed to care about. All of which is probably supposed to supply us with the generic definition of a complex character(s): one who both doesn't value human life and fights tooth and nail for that human life.
Of these 'complex' characters (John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore), Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) emerges as the most significant, the one most in need of saving. This simply because he's a junky, addicted to the rush of saving lives. And it's been so long since he's saved anyone. And, in addition, he's haunted by the (projected) presence of Rose, a young girl who died on him, whom he feels especially guilty for not saving. Of course, too, he tries to ignore her through gin and intravenous cocktails and getting lost in the job, but nothing works; she remains. And it's slowly pushing him over the edge. And everyone's dying on him. And he's got an interior monologue going on just in case we don't pick up on all this.
Enter Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette), someone who, unlike Pierce and the rest of the paramedics, still has some kindness in her. Brings people water when they need water. All of which suggests maybe she can save him. He did resuscitate her cardiac-arrested father with some well-placed Sinatra music, after all, so she does 'owe' him. Too, though, her father might have been better off dead, might in fact have wanted to be dead, and Pierce knows this, and as a result they (Pierce and Burke) just bounce off each other at odd times through the movie, as if their scenes are really only there to allow our eyes a rest from all the city lights constantly streaking by (see: overkill).
Does Pierce get 'saved,' though? It's hard to tell. Or, rather, it's hard to care, as Bringing out the Dead, while ostensibly 'about' him, is really more about the paramedic existence as focused through him. All the whacked-out people, the blood, someone always screaming 'stat' in the background. With the right editing, Bringing Out the Dead could have even made a good mock-documentary on HBO. Too, it could have been developed more in the direction it already leans towards--the vampire genre: all these guys feeding off the dead and dying, the daylight lasting about fifteen seconds, all that fun stuff. As it is, though, it's just a visual ride that goes nowhere. And the bad thing is, look away for five seconds and it's over. The good thing is you don't really miss it. Or, don't feel you missed out on anything.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
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