Martin Scorsese’s latest film returns him to the mean streets of New York city but without the usual fixation on psychotic loners, mafioso or tough punks. Instead we get Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), a paramedic who is addicted to a job, which is very much like a drug. The man, with a number of different partners, throws himself into the most dangerous situations in the monstrous city in order to save those on the brink of death, and this has become his life. Early on he narrates: “Saving someone’s life is like falling in love. God has passed through you, why deny it? For a moment there, you were God.” And this perfectly sets the tone. Frank lives for the momentary grace of saving someone’s life but has become haunted by all the lives he couldn’t save. Plainly put the man is a wreck. He barely eats, sustaining himself rather with booze and caffeine. He can’t sleep due to the visions of people dying in his arms and he can’t quit the job that is clearly driving him mad. Immediately the symbiosis between Frank and all the drug-addicted, homeless and beaten-down lost souls he encounters is established. Since they exist Frank can’t turn his back on being a paramedic, but the job is killing him.
Things seem as if they may take an upturn for the emergency medical technician when he meets Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette), the distraught daughter of a heart attack victim that Frank revives and rushes to hospital. The two keep meeting up near her comatose father’s bedside and a well-sketched rapport that is obviously strained by the situation begins to develop. We learn of her past drug dependence and present estrangement from her father. It seems the two want to get together but the angst which fills their worlds effectively keeps them apart. Throw into this mix Frank’s array of bizarre partners, like the Jesus freak/drunk Marcus (Ving Rhames), or the violent psychopath Tom (Tom Sizemore), and you get a weird, existential reality that both captures something about our dangerous modern world and adds in a good bit of extra anguish. The gritty, sometimes speeded-up, cinematography contributes to the desperate, hopeless feeling. The scenario offers Frank a way out, but the question is does he have the power to move his stopped life and take it? In addition to this tension the film poses the problem of euthanasia. Mary’s father, it seems, wants to die though he survived the heart attack. Should he be killed? Rife with existential questions Bringing Out the Dead is not an easy film but one which offers a few challenges.
