<\/em>I said open up the window, shh-shh-shh-shh-shh, and let me breathe.<\/em>
<\/em>I’m looking down to the street below, Lord, I cried for you,<\/em>
<\/em>Ha ha, I cried, I cried for you, ha ha. Oh, Lord.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The cool room Lord, is a fool’s room.<\/em> Before a single image shows up onscreen in Bringing Out The Dead<\/em>, the wails of emergency response sirens dominate the crisp New York air, like so many spectral howls at the witching hour. Fittingly; paramedic Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) is haunted by his professional past. Next, a sudden revival-esque cacophony sounds off in the beginning notes of \u201cT.B. Sheets,\u201d Van Morrison\u2019s bluesy confession in which he admits to not being able to bear being in the presence of his sick wife for a moment more. Within minutes of the film\u2019s beginning, the parallel is clear: we meet our hero Frank at a point where he can no longer stand the heavy rigors of the first responder life. Frank, during one of his many narrations, sings a blues song of his own: \u201cI had to concentrate to keep my mind from wandering off on these short trips. It was the neighborhood I grew up in, and the one I worked the most as a paramedic, and it held more ghosts per square foot than any other.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Based on a novel by Joe Connelly, Martin Scorsese\u2019s Bringing Out The Dead<\/em> is one of the last great films to come spilling forth from the wild and dark cinematic womb of 1999\u2014 the same warped uterus that housed Fincher\u2019s Fight Club<\/em>, Kubrick\u2019s Eyes Wide Shut<\/em>, and Jonze\u2019s Being John Malkovich<\/em>. Overseas, the New French Extremity was germinating with Pola X<\/em>, sprouting a weed infestation of ultraviolent, envelope-pushing films about, among other things, fear of the Other. Though Scorsese is an old-school director from the wave of independent easy riders and raging bulls that came up in the sixties and seventies\u2014Altman, Malick, Coppola\u2014he had no trouble adapting to the ever-expanding limits of technology and storytelling. The same year that audiences chose the red pill and unplugged from the Matrix<\/em>, the Kundun<\/em> director fired off a final shot from his 20th<\/sup> century body of work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Paul Schrader handled the screenplay adaptation, continuing his here-and-there collaboration with Scorsese. It\u2019s apparent; Pierce\u2019s monologues take on a similar disillusioned sickness to a certain cabbie who yearns for a real rain to come and wash the scum from the streets. Though less explosive than Travis Bickle, Frank Pierce is still a ticking time bomb, searching for purpose and a little redemption if he can get it. Schrader\u2019s beloved transcendental style aids him in creating a poignant observation of America\u2019s unsung heroes that pulls no punches in its depravity, but nor does it glorify its most salacious elements. Less plot-driven and more Robotussin fugue-state, Pierce makes his way through a graveyard shift with a colorful assortment of characters and locations, each more godless than the last. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The first partner he teams up with is Larry, a perpetually hungry layabout played with the full-throated jolliness to be expected from John Goodman. Together, they handle drunks, shootings, and overdoses, their vehicle a pontoon sailing into its own heart of darkness. There\u2019s no Colonel Kurtz waiting at the end, but Charlie haunts Pierce in the form of the people he couldn\u2019t salvage from death in the past. Particularly persistent of these spectral visions is Rose, an asthmatic homeless teen he improperly intubated (she died quickly after) six months prior. Everywhere he goes, her solemn face appears over the people of New York, ever-judging, ever-watching. As the shift continues over three unforgiving nights, Frank\u2019s mental state rapidly crumbles; he becomes overwhelmed with PTSD and the simple truth that he can\u2019t save everyone:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was impossible to pass by a building that didn\u2019t hold a ghost of something: the eyes of a corpse, the screams of a loved one. All bodies leave their mark. You cannot be near the newly dead without feeling it. I could handle that. What haunted me now was more savage: spirits born half-finished, homicides, suicides, overdoses. Accusing me of being there, witnessing a humiliation which they could never forget.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of Frank\u2019s voice over monologues confess to feelings of spiritual malaise: claustrophobia, anxiousness, a lack of safety, regret. It\u2019s here that the soundtrack shines, amplifying these streams of consciousness through song: Martha and the Vandellas\u2019 \u201cNowhere To Run,\u201d The Clash\u2019s \u201cI\u2019m So Bored With The U.S.A.,\u201d The Melodians\u2019 \u201cRivers of Babylon,\u201d a whiplash-inducing oscillation between genres, all connected by a sense of ever-receding safety in a strange land. It\u2019s more than nifty needle-drops\u2014it\u2019s a playlist for a personal apocalypse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Frank\u2019s ambulance rig is its own little canoe riding along the River Styx, the hospitals each a little circle of Hell. Between the medical facilities of Misery and Bellevue, the wretched refuse that the Statue of Liberty welcomes mere miles away are all on display in a Boschian hellscape of hopelessness and chaos. Biblical imagery abounds: a loinclothed man carrying a crucifix at 2am, Madonna and child poses between medic and impaled drug dealer, an apocalyptic white horse to behold, and\u2014the cherry on top\u2014a virgin birth. Frank strikes an alliance of mutual fatigue with the daughter of a heart attack victim (that victim\u2019s perpetual state of coma-induced limbo haunts him just as much as Rose does), played with glassy-eyed enthusiasm by Patricia Arquette. She\u2019s no angel, a former junkie with a heart of gold who understands the outcasts of society because she, too, is one. Her name: Mary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the scenic tour along that River Styx, Frank\u2019s ferrymen change. First the gluttonous Larry, then the righteous Marcus (Ving Rhames), and finally the loose cannon Tom (Tom Sizemore, matching the energy of the frantic distortions of The Clash at their earliest and most disillusioned), each a fabled archetype of their own. Marcus is a spiritual advisor of sorts, preaching the good word and even using an overdose and his partner\u2019s Narcan treatment as a demonstration of the magnificent power of Jesus. Schrader leans fully into his own Calvinist upbringing in his shaping of Marcus, who is a hypocrite and a sinner, treating women as both toys to be played with (he taunts sex workers with cash in hand and harasses his dispatcher who is clearly not interested in him) and objects of reverence when they give birth. His best advice, though, can be applied to the pious and secular alike, \u201cEverybody gonna go through a stretch where folks gonna die on you. Just don\u2019t meditate on it.\u201d Unfortunately, Frank does a lot of meditating on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks to Thelma Schoonmaker\u2019s explosive editing, Frank\u2019s meditations take on a manic, adrenaline-fueled quality. This may be the former Army medic in me talking, but anyone who has ever pulled a graveyard shift in a stressful job is chillingly aware of the important stuff that you nearly sleepwalk through (trained to complete our tasks without a second thought), and the minutiae that destroys you if you dwell on it (the bloody shoe left on the floor by that kid you couldn\u2019t save in time). Robert Richardson’s deftly-framed cinematography, at times exaggerated like films of the German Expressionists and at others eerily controlled and refusing to look away, frames Pierce\u2019s oscillation between exhaustion and desperate rage with ease. A hallucinatory trip sequence has Frank fantasizing of pulling the lost souls from the streets of New York (as Dante wishes to rescue the damned from the frozen lake of Hades) before replaying Rose\u2019s asthmatic incident that led to her regretful, preventable death. The snow is flying upwards, indicating that the entire scene is filmed in reverse, adding an uncanny texture to the trip. Soon after, it\u2019s right back to the night shift and all of the Book of Revelations mayhem that comes along with it. Schoonmaker transitions between the moods so swiftly and jarringly that there\u2019s not a moment to rest\u2014we can smell the sick sheets, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The common complaint about Cage\u2019s acting is that his unhinged rants have become almost a parody of themselves at this point, that he\u2019s not really acting, that the cheese has already slid off his cracker long ago and directors are just turning the camera on and letting the tiger out of its cage. This sort of thing is wildly subjective; Stephen King\u2019s biggest beef with Kubrick\u2019s adaptation of The Shining<\/em> was that Jack Nicholson already had an air of sinister instability about him which, to the Shining<\/em>\u2019s author, stripped any believable, gradual volatility from Jack Torrance. But as with Nicholson, Cage\u2019s balls-to-the-wall honesty lends itself to the role. For both protagonists, all work and no play did a real number on their psyches. Cage\u2019s performance is restrained when it needs to be, and turns up to eleven at moments that underline his character\u2019s loosening grip on reality (and nail the gallows humor that permeates a pitch-black script).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bringing Out The Dead<\/em> is open to infinite interpretation, and caught hell in its day because it raises questions and refuses to spoon-feed any answers. It got no Oscar nominations, the only Scorsese joint of the ’90s to do so. As such, it stands as one of the most undervalued films of the decade. When the sirens have all dissipated into the cityscape and the gurneys have been cleaned, Scorsese and Schrader\u2019s tag-team masterpiece is a simple one: it\u2019s bearing witness for a man who can smell the city\u2019s t.b. sheets, and just wants someone to open up the window and let him breathe.
<\/em>The cool room Lord, is a fool’s room.<\/em>
<\/em>And I can almost smell your T.B. sheets<\/em>
<\/em>And I can almost smell your T.B. sheets<\/em>
<\/em>On your sick bed.\u201d<\/em>
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