The Travolta/Cage Project #58 Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
One of the curious, unfortunate aspects of The Travolta/Cage Project and the Travolta/Cage podcast is that it forces me to write about movies I've seen and written about just a few years ago.
It’s not that unfortunate, however. The human brain is a fantastical and beguilingly strange thing. With the notable exception of the various iterations of Justice League, the most important movie ever, films stay the same but people change.
I am not the same man I was twenty four years ago, when I began this journey as a freelancer for The A.V Club. I’m not even the same person I was when I wrote about Bringing Out the Dead for Flavorwire several years ago for its twentieth anniversary.
I’m lucky in that some of the movies I have been forced to revisit for this project have been so dazzlingly inept and overflowing with craziness, like Look Who’s Talking Now!, which I wrote about for my Rotten Tomatoes column The Zeroes before it was put on indefinite hiatus a few years back, that I could write about them over and over and over again and still not unpack all of their insanity.
I’ve been even luckier in that some of the movies I’ve covered, like Bringing Out the Dead, are so rich and dense and filled with wonders that I could similarly re-watch them and write about them repeatedly and never run out of new things to discover.
That’s because Bringing Out the Dead is a Martin Scorsese movie and the diminutive Italian cinephile’s movies, like the films of fellow masters The Coen Brothers don’t just lend themselves to being re-watched a number of times that borders on unhealthy and pathological: they angrily demand it.
I cannot count how many times I’ve seen Goodfellas or King of Comedy or After Hours. That’s even true of Casino, which, like Bringing Out the Dead, has the curious distinction of being a great film that suffers by comparison from being a companion piece to an even greater film or films.
Bringing Out the Dead has the fortune and misfortune of being a wonderful, wildly entertaining, soulful and personal masterpiece that can’t quite measure up to its director and screenwriter’s previous collaborations (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ) on account of those literally being three of the best, most important and controversial movies ever made.
Re-watching Bringing Out the Dead made me hate Joker even more because the billion-dollar grossing Academy Award winner strives so desperately to be a Martin Scorsese movie, or rather two Scorsese movies (Taxi Driver and King of Comedy) and failed miserably in the attempt.
Bringing Out the Dead, in sharp contrast, does not have to try to be a Martin Scorsese movie because it is a Martin Scorsese movie. It comes about its Taxi Driver/After Hours vibe organically without feeling like the product of an auteur content to cannibalize himself and his former triumphs after the inspiration ran out.
Based on the best-selling semi-autobiographical novel from Joe Connelly, Bringing Out the Dead casts Nicolas Cage as soulful, sad-eyed protagonist Frank Pierce. Frank works as a paramedic in Manhattan in the early 1990s.
Frank is hopelessly addicted to the natural, life-affirming high of saving people’s lives but as the film opens it has been a very long time since he’s saved anyone and he’s beginning to feel like he’ll never save anyone ever again.
Frank is living in hell. Everywhere he goes he is haunted by the angry spirits of the people he could not save, all the lost souls doomed to wander the world forever, never finding peace. He needs a good night’s sleep and a long vacation but he’s stuck in a place where he can’t stop but it’s also becoming impossible to keep on going.
Frank is a nocturnal creature in a nocturnal movie with no use for the sun or daytime. Everything takes place after hours where the rules are either different or non-existent.
Bringing Out the Dead follows its deeply scarred hero as he makes his nightly rounds with three very different partners with very different ways of seeing the world and their place in it. Frank’s ambulance mates grow increasingly sketchy until he’s essentially paired with madness incarnate in the form of Tom Wolls (Tom Sizemore), who is a rampaging id in human form.
Sizemore brought all of his demons and all of his darkness to the role, which is bruisingly intense even by Scorsese/Schrader standards.
But before our hero hooks up with a straight up villain he’s partnered with Larry (John Goodman), a relatively solid dude with hopes and dreams and a family and a life outside of work. That makes him an anomaly in this achingly sad world, where there seems to be no way out.
Frank then shares an ambulance with Marcus (Travolta/Cage All-Star Ving Rhames, in one of the greatest roles and performances in a career full of them), a flamboyant self-styled lady’s man and man of faith who preaches salvation but practices sin.
He’s got a preacher’s cadences, a shocking amount of hair and a flashy theatricality that upstages even the formidable likes of Cage, who starts the film on the brink of madness and slips further and further with every step yet still ends up playing straight man to Rhames and Sizemore.
Patricia Arquette, who was married to Cage at the time Bringing Out the Dead was made, plays Mary Burke, a poignantly fragile survivor with a dark history of addiction and familial dysfunction who loses her sobriety when her father becomes desperately ill.
Marc Anthony brings a live wire energy to the scene stealing role of Noel, a neighborhood character blessed and cursed with the gift of madness who lives on the knife’s edge between life and death and feels less like a flesh and blood human being than the dark, wild, weirdly tender spirit of New York.
Bringing Out the Dead would be unbearably grim and depressing if it weren’t so funny and entertaining. God bless Martin Scorsese. He can have all kinds of fun with a story about a deeply depressed burn out in a state of bone-deep exhaustion who yearns for sleep in all its form, including the eternal sleep of death.
The unrelenting darkness is further leavened by a very Martin Scorsese vein of gallows humor and pitch-black comedy. After all, if Frank and his coworkers weren’t able to laugh at the Kafkaesque nightmare that is their lives and careers they’d be even crazier than they already are.
As in Taxi Driver, Scorsese gives himself a memorable supporting turn that allows him to add his inimitable voice—a voice known and beloved to movie lovers everywhere—to the film literally as well as creatively.
Along with Queen Latifah, Scorsese is seen but never heard as a dispatcher with a sardonic sense of humor and way with words. There’s a distinctly meta element to his performance: onscreen and off he’s the boss telling his eccentric cast of New York characters what to do, a veteran conductor of barely controlled chaos.
Throughout the film Frank and his partners are faced with a bleak dilemma: do you go out of your way to try to save lives that might not be worth saving?
Do you save the life of someone who just gets drunk and shits themself and needs to be hospitalized pretty much everyday, and consequently does not have a whole lot to offer society, objectively speaking?
For the deeply Catholic, deeply moral Scorsese, the answer is an unambiguous yes because human life has innate dignity and worth no matter how badly it is squandered.
The entirety of Bringing Out the Dead matches the intensity of a go-for-broke Nicolas Cage performance like the one at its core. That should be exhausting and overwhelming. It is but in a good, deliberate way.
This is a mood piece, a fever dream of Manhattan, a cinematic blues song mad with energy and excitement, the dazzling work of one of our true masters.
How ironic yet appropriate that a movie about death and disease and dying like Bringing Out the Dead would also be so wonderfully, roaringly full of life.
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