Non-Scoring Scorsese. - Review - movie reviews

National Review, Nov 22, 1999 by John Simon

You have to admire Martin Scorsese's enterprising spirit. How many filmmakers have had his range of genres-from Mean Streets to The Age of Innocence, from Raging Bull to Kundun, from The Last Waltz to The Last Temptation of Christ? But in his latest, Bringing Out the Dead, Scorsese attempts the impossible: The film wants to be another Taxi Driver and yet something altogether different.

Scorsese is best known for his exposes of urban grubbiness, big-city scum, petty criminality escalating into major crime, lost souls bruised and buffeted by the megalopolis. So Bringing Out the Dead is about that, but to avoid repeating himself, he makes it self-consciously arty. But gritty and arty do not lend themselves to easy congeniality, even if in past times, unselfconsciously, Scorsese managed their fleeting rapprochement.

The new movie concerns EMS paramedics on the night shift on the meanest streets of pre-Giuliani New York (early '90s), from Times Square to Hell's Kitchen, during three nights and, much less conspicuously, two days. Days, in fact, barely register; in the kitchens of Hell, it is all-but-perpetual night. The film is based on a recent novel by Joe Connelly, who spent nine years as a paramedic, and was written by Paul Schrader, who wrote or co- wrote several Scorsese screenplays. Here let us reflect on the Scorsese- Schrader axis. Both grew up in, so to speak, the antechambers of Heaven: Scorsese in a religious Catholic home, Schrader in a strict Protestant one.

In The New Yorker, the clever Anthony Lane describes the Scorsese-Schrader collaboration as "the cool agonies of the Calvinist reacting with the operatic delirium of the Italian Catholic," which may be a bit too clever. But there is no doubt about some metaphysical baggage in the mentalities of both men, surfacing in both visual and verbal symbols. In this instance we get a crackhouse done all in red, notoriously Satan's favorite decorating scheme. So Frank, the hero, and his girl, Mary (!), will enact a Pieta scene; the fictional hospital in which much of the action takes place is called Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy. The teenaged girl for whose death in his arms Frank blames himself was called Rose, as in Rosa Mystica.

Again, when the drug dealer played by Cliff Curtis is impaled on a wrought-iron balcony railing high above the street, and welders have perilously to pry him loose, sparks fly heavenward and are shot from below like a shower of meteors joining up with Fourth of July fireworks. The wretch, seemingly roasted on a devilish spit, asks, "Isn't that beautiful?" Even a sinner can be vouchsafed a paradisiac vision.

There is more. A virginal girl called Maria gives birth to twins-think of all those Renaissance paintings of little Jesus and John the Baptist as babies gamboling together. The film begins with a long-held closeup of Nicolas Cage's (Frank's) anguished eyes, the windows of the soul; near the end, we glimpse a crazed paramedic smashing the headlights of his ambulance. Could this be Jeremiah 5:21: "O foolish people . . . which have eyes and see not"? And still more to come

Frank Pierce is strung out almost beyond endurance by the miseries dogging his hangdog eyes: the overdosing addicts, the stabbed and the shot, the would-be suicides, and the otherwise shadowed by death-like Mr. Burke, whose heart gave out, and whom Frank, with his trusty defibrillator, brings back from the dead as the anxious family watches. At other times, as Frank wearily concludes, "It was enough that I showed up. I was a grief mop," the Messiah as a household utensil. Peter Rainer has a point in New York magazine: "The religio-metaphorical haze . . . gussies up the horrors." Frank will keep checking up on how Burke is doing, thus continually running into his daughter, the aforesaid Mary, keeping vigil at his bedside.

Mary is played by Patricia Arquette, in private life Mrs. Cage. Since they are two of the most unversatile and unappealing actors on screen, I would like to hope that they are perfectly mated off screen. But what can we feel for them here? He with his permanently martyred, bag-encircled gaze, his face of a maltreated nag with one or two feet in the glue factory, and his rust-encrusted voice trying to outdo a comb covered with tissue paper, as he bears the world's wretchedness on his sagging shoulders.

And she is no less a turnoff, with her blank, unimprinted countenance, her Pillsbury-doughboy figure, and foreshortened bandy legs, waddling after him like a Panzaesque troll after a pipestem Don Quixote. What a pair! They even share a nepotistic background: he as the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, she as the granddaughter of Cliff Arquette. Even in their few happy moments, they generate no chemistry, as if waiting for a Bunsen burner to help them out with a hotfoot.

On the three successive nights, Frank rides with different partners: the portly, garrulous, esurient Larry (John Goodman); the unhinged and sadistic Tom (Tom Sizemore); and the lusty, imperturbable Marcus (Ving Rhames), who jokes and flirts with the dispatchers (the voices of Scorsese and the rapper Queen Latifah, among others). Marcus uses rousing prayer as a means of resuscitation of human flotsam such as Noel (Marc Anthony, the singer). With his dreadlocks and dreadful thirst, which he must not slake for medical reasons, Noel figures as a troubling refrain throughout. We get a rogues' gallery to do a police blotter proud, especially in the hospital scenes that labor heroically to trump the sundry hospital shows sprouting on television.