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Bringing Out the Dead****

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.