Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

reviewed by
Gary Jones


Bringing Out The Dead  (7/10) 

In 1976's Taxi Driver, director Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader examined the sordid and violent street life of New York through the eyes of the increasingly disgusted and deranged cabbie Travis Bickle, memorably played by Robert De Niro in his star-making role.

In Bringing Out The Dead, Scorsese and Schrader have teamed up again to examine a similar theme. Nicholas Cage plays Frank Pierce, a New York ambulance driver and paramedic. He works in the same awful urban environment as Travis Bickle, and the New York tourist board cannot be at all happy with the portrayal of their city there is no sign here of the dramatic recent repackaging of New York as a safe and friendly city, and the hospital scenes are more reminiscent of MASH than ER. The grim setting is matched by Frank's mood. He is on a bad streak. He is drinking and he has not saved a life for months. One death in particular, that of a teenage girl, is haunting him, and he sees her face everywhere he looks.

Scorsese's early work, such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, relied for its power on a documentary approach to depicting a frantic and overpoweringly scary reality. With Raging Bull, his enduring masterpiece, he developed a more technically sophisticated approach. While fellow New Yorker Brian De Palma is an equally good technician (if we forget such incompetent tripe as Body Double), Scorsese uses his mastery of the medium to produce movies that convince while they dazzle. Films such as Goodfellas, for example, drop us in a world of believable characters whose story we want to follow, regardless of how repulsive the characters often are. And despite Scorsese's brilliance, and Schrader's talent as a writer, it is the lack of a compelling story that spoils Bringing Out The Dead. Frank is screwed up. He meets a girl. He sorts himself out. That's about it. This lack of a narrative structure makes the film a bit limp. There are some typically exhilarating Scorsese sequences, but they seem almost bolted on because the audience will expect them, not because they are called on by the story. The most interesting characters are Frank's fellow ambulance drivers played by a dream team of Hollywood character actors: a laid-back take-it-or-leave- it John Goodman, a sweet-talking evangelising Ving Rhames, and a violent manic Tom Sizemore, who inflicts as much pain and injury as he treats.

Although the film has an original score by veteran Elmer Berstein, the most striking use of music is found in the use of some wonderful tracks from such bands as The Who and The Clash, but the relevance of these British bands from the 70s to a story set in 90s New York was lost on me. This disjointed and inappropriate use of music perhaps contributes to the feel of a movie that just doesn't work as a whole.

Bringing Out The Dead is a good film, but not a great one, and with a master such as Scorsese, anything less than great is a let-down.

-- Gary Jones Homepage: www.bohr.demon.co.uk PGP public key available from servers (DH/DSS key ID: 0x11EAE903)


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