Visiting "the Dead"

I forgot how much I admired Bringing Out the Dead until I watched it this week.  What struck me in particular this time around was the film's historical context.  It's as much a period piece as Gangs of New York is (and a more humane film, too).  Robert Richardson's cinematography, leaning heavily on overexposure and saturation, carefully reconstructs the aesthetic of the great television crime dramas of the late 80s and early 90s -- "In the Heat of the Night," "Law & Order," "Homicide" are just a few that come to mind.  High contrast, grainy footage characterized those productions as the gritty, "real" life dramas they were, but Richardson's work then elevates the material to the world of the spiritual, skillfully painting the streets of New York with the blackest shadows and the brightest lights.

In many ways, I should think it would be harder to recreate a period of time only ten years behind the present (the film's release was in 1999) than the more easily identifiable signposts of, say, the post-Victorian era represented in The Age of Innocence.  But Scorsese has been documenting the transformation of New York neighborhoods his entire career, so it's interesting to think of Bringing Out the Dead as a natural continuation of his life's work.

With every Starbucks and Kinkos that pops up on the corner, it's easy to take for granted that even as recently as the early 90s, New York was still very much a violent, depraved city, far from the "safest big city in the world" tag it has now.  To that end, Bringing Out the Dead is fascinating, illustrating the ways in which the city used to be so vital, thrilling, and hellish in the era of the Central Park Jogger and the crack epidemic.

The script, adapted by Paul Schraeder from Joe Connelly's book, brilliantly realizes the psychological ambiance of 4 a.m.  The act of "bearing witness" to death preoccupies the film's haunted hero Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage), an EMT who comes to see himself as a kind of death angel, someone who in actuality saves a very small percentage of the patients he responds to and is simply there to mark the passage of their souls into the next world.  One patient named Rose in particular, an asthmatic girl in her teens who dies on his watch, troubles him throughout.

Of the many qualities of Schraeder's script, one of its strongest is its allowance that Frank is delusional in this regard.  A masochist at heart, Frank does plenty of self-medicating on the job, abusing anything from Gin to shots of adrenaline to get through a long shift.  He may be suffering, but he has settled into his suffering.  After depositing a gunshot victim at the doors of Our Lady of Mercy, an unrelenting carnival of surreality that acts as the film's central locale, Mary (Patricia Aqruette), the daughter of one of the patients he's brought in, points out, "You're covered in blood."  With a kind of vacant, knowing weariness, Frank replies, "I know."  More troubling is the idea that Frank is torturing himself with ghosts of the people he couldn't save for no good reason.  As one of Rose's apparitions points out, "Suffering was your idea."  Schraeder effectively illustrates that Frank's recently-adopted world view is a coping mechanism that circumvents the fact that death is arbitrary or, worse, meaningless.  If he can attribute the death of a patient to his own bad-luck or a kind of punishment being handed by some mysterious Presence, it is somehow easier to find meaning in his job, even if it's in a perverse way.

All of this self-flagellation actually makes Frank more sympathetic.  Rather than perform his job with the same detachment as his partner Larry (John Goodman), the thrill-seeking of Tom (a crackling Tom Sizemore), or the theatrical spirituality of Marcus (Ving Rhames), Frank's personal investment in offering some kind of closure to patients and their families make him a worthy avatar through which we experience the frights of urban decay.  He seems to be the only EMT who is aware that human lives and all their associated costs are at stake.

Thus, his attachment to Mary.  As her father see-saws between life and death, Frank feels compelled to try and look out for her, offering her rides to and from the hospital in the ambulance, offering up slices of his pizza, and checking on her father's condition whenever he can.  As she details her tortured relationship to her father, she asks him, "Do people usually just spill their guts out to you like this?" and he replies, "Yes, something about my face... my mother always said I looked like a priest."

While Mary and Frank seem too damaged to participate in any kind of meaningful relationship, one of my favorite scenes in the film reveals a little glimpse of their connection without a word passing between them:  Just the two of them riding in the back of the ambulance on their way to the hospital, grateful to be in the presence of the other's company, even if they have nothing to say.  On paper, Frank and Mary helping each other through what amounts to three days of insanity (beginning on a Thursday night, the better to invoke the Passion) might not seem like a worthwhile arc, and at times it comes off as stilted, but in the hands of masters like Schraeder and Scorsese, their relationship, no matter how understated, offers a welcome reprieve from the unrelenting violence of Frank's world.

The soundtrack is exceptional.  Choosing from a slightly more up-to-date rock pantheon than usually appears in Scorsese's films, Scorsese manages to finesse the line between diagetic and non-diegetic music while nailing the pathos of the film at the same time.  We can readily imagine R.E.M.'s "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" coming over the ambulance radio in the early 90s, or the Clash's "Janie Jones" on the classic rock station, but Johnny Thunders' "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory" and Van Morrison's recurring "T.B. Sheets" underscore Frank's soul-sickness.

Cage, who at that point in his career seemed satisfied with churning out silly action movies (The Rock, Con Air), offers up dynamic performance in Dead, ably navigating material that veers wildly from the humorous to the insane and beyond.  Mostly, though, it is a humble performance, allowing room for the vivid supporting actors to flourish, among them an almost unrecognizable Marc Anthony, and it's refreshing to be reminded of what Cage can do with compelling material.

Interestingly enough, Bringing Out the Dead is not included in Schraeder's unofficial "Night Worker" installment, which began with Taxi Driver (which Dead most resembles narratively and aesthetically), and continued with American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, and most recently 2007's The Walker.  Dead is better than all but one of those films in Schraeder's installment, and Frank Pierce is easily the most redeemable night worker in this lineage.  Perhaps this is precisely the reason it's left out:  Unlike Schraeder's more nebulous low-lives, we acutely sense that there is hope for Frank.