MOVIES Jonathan Richards
BRINGING OUT THE DEAD Directed by Martin Scorsese Screenplay by Paul Schrader from Joe Connelly's novel With Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette De Vargas R 118 min
The title of Martin Scorsese's new movie (adapted by Paul Schrader from the bestseller by former paramedic Joe Connelly) reflects the grisly cry of corpse-collectors in plague-stricken 18th century London: "Bring out your dead!" The New York City Scorsese shows us at the end of the 20th century is gripped by no less deadly a plague; it is a nightmare world crushed under an epidemic of drugs, violence, and indifference.
Scorsese is perhaps the most revered living American director, admired by peers and critics for his mastery of the language of film. And yet he is a director with a deep and abiding propensity to disappoint. In "Bringing Out the Dead" he disappoints again, with a movie that lacks narrative drive and coherence, but that still manages to pack plenty of virtuoso filmmaking into its two hours.
At the center of things is Frank Pierce, a paramedic at the end of his skein, played by Nicolas Cage in a stunned, anguished trance. Pale of skin and dark of eye, he looks as if he's been made up for a Tim Burton movie. Frank drives an ambulance through the streets of New York accompanied by a series of partners, listening to emergency radio dispatches broadcast as Altmanesque asides ("A woman has gone into cardiac arrest because a roach has crawled in her ear and she can't get it out") and sometimes responding to them.
The action (you couldn't call it story) covers three nights in Frank's disintegrating life. On the first, he's called to try to revive a man who's had a heart attack, and manages to get a heartbeat again after the man's been dead for 20 minutes. He's ambivalent about this ("I've come to believe in spirits leaving the body and not wanting to come back"), but he's been on a losing streak, hasn't saved a life in months, and then there's the man's daughter (Patricia Arquette), who seems to light some extinguished fire deep in Frank's spiritual wasteland.
Arquette is bland, and Cage's mumbling, stumbling performance (occasionally leavened by bursts of manic energy) is drawn from the actor's increasingly familiar and finite bag of tricks. The performances that give this film life come from his three partners, John Goodman, Tom Sizemore, and especially Ving Rhames. There's also a wonderfully sinister velvet turn from New Zealander Cliff Curtis ("Three Kings") as an upscale drug dealer, and Mary Beth Hurt is memorable as a tough-talking ER nurse ("I don't see why we should help you -- did we shove the heroin up your nose?")
Scorsese dazzles with some breathtaking visuals and powerful scenes, but the movie has an unfocused, rambling feel that reaches several climaxes of ennui before it plays itself out.
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