After Eyes Wide Shut,
I had hardly expected to see another equally impressive movie
this year, but instead I saw two, this film and Fight Club.
There is so much to say about both of these that anything
like an in depth of review of either might run as long as
this entire Raft of Reviews. Therefore, I am going to limit
my remarks for the time being and postpone a more detailed
critique until the pictures appear on DVD. (Fox has announced
an April release date for the DVD of Fight Club, which
can be pre-ordered from Amazon at a considerable savings.) Like Eyes
Wide Shut, Bringing Out the Dead takes place in
New York City, but the NYC of the one is as different from
that of the other as night is from day. Set in the early
1990's, Scorsese's movie covers a few days in the life of a
paramedic, Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) whose patients are
mainly poor and somewhat miserable specimens of humanity,
many of them involved in drug-dealing or petty crime.
(Supposedly the conditions depicted in the film have improved
in the meantime.) Frank had lost one of these patients--a
young Puerto Rican girl who reappears to haunt him in
subjective flashbacks that punctuate the film--and he has an
obsession with delivering his present ones alive to the
hospital he works out of, a large, metropolitan and not too
classy Catholic institution. Yet in spite of this grittily
realistic subject matter, Scorsese's picture--whose action
takes place mainly at night--is more like Dante's Inferno,
the Nighttown episode from James Joyce's Ulysses,
and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch all
rolled into one. (Now David Cronenberg's version of Burroughs
will look even more like the paretic travesty it is than ever
before.) In
Bringing
Out the Dead, the quite detailed realistic surface
serves as a transparency through which Scorsese, abetted by
the cinematography of Robert Richardson and the editing of
his long time collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, reveals a
luminous if troubled and troubling vision of the human
condition. Nor does the conclusion try to offer any facile
resolution to this disturbing vision; the final shot of Frank
and Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette), whom he has succeeded in
rescuing from the streets, only suggests a momentary reprieve
from a struggle that will imminently resume in all its fury.
Following the glowing arc that
goes from Taxi Driver and New York, New York
through Good Fellas on to Casino and
Kundun, Scorsese's films have become more
terrifyingly beautiful, more imaginatively profound, more
complex in the demands they make on the audience. No one in
the mainstream American movie industry has made movies like
these since the heyday of Alfred Hitchcock. (For any number
of reasons, I would not have characterized Kubrick as a
mainstream American director. James Agee once wrote that
Charlie Chaplin didn't make American movies--he made Chaplin
movies. The same seems to me to apply to Kubrick just as it
did to Orson Welles.) More than anything else, with this film
Scorsese emerges as perhaps the only American director who
could be compared with the late Robert Bresson. The movie plays
the religious card very strongly--the film's title is
virtually a gloss on the word "resurrection" and
even the advertising showed Nicolas Cage's face framed by a
cross--but religious doctrine is no more the real subject
here than it is in the films of Bresson. Both directors are more than anything
else fascinated with characters pushed to the extreme limits
of intense experience. Bresson's Trial of Joan of Arc
is not about how to become a saint but how an ordinary young
woman purifies her life to the point where she truly burns
with a "hard, gemlike flame" in the famous words of
Walter Pater. (Years ago, in that unforgivable piece of
baboon doodoo American Gigolo, Paul Schrader
shamelessly ripped off the great ending of Bresson's Pickpocket.
But he has acquitted himself above and beyond the call of
duty with his screenplay for Bringing Out the Dead, based
on a novel by Joe Connelly.)
Many
of Scorsese's earlier films have had a somewhat hallucinatory
quality, but Bringing Out the Dead is visionary
film making at a level of intensity I have rarely experienced
and least of all in a commercially produced American motion
picture. As far
as I'm concerned, the appropriate comparisons here would be
to directors of the status of Carl Dreyer, Jean Cocteau,
Roberto Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Robert Bresson. This
kind of filmmaking is not everybody's cup of tea and it by no
means exhausts the possibilities of cinema as art, even at a
very high level, but that in no way justifies the blindness
of most reviewers to Bringing Out the Dead's
achievement. Considering the poor showing of Eyes
Wide Shut and the not very thrilling performance of
this film at the box office, what concerns me is not only the
future of Martin Scorsese but the future of serious film
making in this country. In his review in The Los Angeles
Times, Kenneth Turan complained that "the film's
virtuoso style doesn't compensate enough for an emotional
coldness that keeps us at a distance." Was his head up
the part of his anatomy where the sun never shines when he
wrote those words? To paraphrase the old tag, with friends
like that a director doesn't need enemies. Doesn't it occur
to him that without that distance the film would be almost
unbearable? The audience the evening I saw Bringing Out
the Dead obviously couldn't keep up with what was going
on. Even the use of film syntax--for example, when Scorsese
uses a series of dissolves in a scene at the hospital between
Cage and Patricia Arquette--went over their heads, judging by
the giggles. Maybe they could use some help from reviewers?
People like Turan who gripe about the paucity of good movies
these days will only have themselves to blame when the
screens are filled with nothing but sagas about horny
adolescents satisfying their libidinal urges in the family
pastry or action pictures with dialogue so dumb it will make
the lines in a Superman comic book sound like Racinian
tragedy
Postscript: In editing this
review, I realized that I had failed to say anything about
Elmer Bernstein's superb score for Bringing Out the Dead,
which like any score by a skilled composer adds immeasurably
to the total effect of the picture.