Bringing Out The Dead

365 Films

Entry #127

Bringing Out The Dead (1999)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Bringing Out The Dead opened with an underwhelming whimper in the fall of 1999.  The heavily hyped (for some people) re-teaming of screenwriter Paul Schrader with director Martin Scorsese seemed like a can’t possibly lose situation.  Then the film was released, audiences shrugged their shoulders, and the film quickly vanished from public consciousness.  One of the movie events of the fall turned into a dud quickly outflanked by the likes of American Beauty and End of Days.  1999 is often heralded as one of the last recent renaissance years for American film and sadly, in my opinion, Bringing Out The Dead is never held in as high esteem as some of the other titles from that year (although I’m sure most people consider it superior to End of Days…right?)  The reason I am choosing this particular film as the beginning of the Scorsese filmography is because this is the first Scorsese film with which I truly connected.  1997’s Kundun was a visual marvel but I believe I was simply too young to understand any of the elements outside of that and I do hope to revisit the film specifically for this blog.  Bringing Out The Dead was the film he made directly after Kundun and is, in a way, almost a perfect primer for his unique and completely cinematic filmmaking sensibilities.  This is something that a lot of its detractors chose to target the film for, considering it shares a lot of its tone and content with Schrader and Scorsese’s sanctified 70’s masterpiece, Taxi Driver.  To me, this rings as false as the critical stones lobbed at Casino upon its release for being too identical to Goodfellas.  I gotta stop bringing up discussions to be had for future blog entries, so I’ll make an attempt to cut to the chase with this one.  I’ve always considered Bringing Out The Dead to be a hopeful vision of the existential crisis that is life from two men who grown in the twenty plus years since they last tackled the subject.  That’s not meant to imply that the film is somehow mushy in its execution, but that it is clearly not the product of two angry young men in the same way that Taxi Driver was and remains to be (not a slam against that film, as you will see in a future blog post).  One of the things I love most about Bringing Out The Dead is that its conception of New York is that of a recurring nightmare.  It’s an amazing balancing act that Scorsese and company pull of because they manage to make the Pre-Giuliani Hell’s Kitchen of the early 90’s as claustrophobic as any depiction of the Big Apple that I can recall.   Yet, at the same time there is this incredibly comforting sense of how familiar everything seems.  The night, the skyline, and the lights seem to have inexorable pull over the EMS teams we witness cycle through a three night period of the week.  It’s the kind of perspective that could only come from people who have spent their entire life in New York and watched it change along with them.  I would also be remiss not to mention Nicolas Cage’s remarkable performance and one for which he is all too often forgotten when people wish to turn him into Nicolas Cage the freak show rather than the actor.  It’s a wonder to me that Cage and Scorsese had not collaborated prior to or since Bringing Out The Dead because they seem to be so perfectly in sync.  Cage is the perfect vessel for Scorsese (and Schrader’s) perpetual thematic fascination with, as critic Glenn Kenny wrote, “men who can’t stop hurting themselves.”  He is by turns here frightening, funny, and pathetic in equal measure and he truly anchors the film and gives it a genuine emotional core around which, the insanity and mayhem of Scorsese’s visuals and the supporting actor’s performances may orbit.  This is a powerful, humane, and caustically funny piece of work about finding transcendence in a city and a profession that seems diametrically opposed to the idea.