Movie Reviews

Bringing Out the Dead

12 July 2000

A few years ago, Sean Penn censured his friend Nicolas Cage for selling out by making dopey movies like Face/Off and The Rock. Now, the very silly Gone in 60 Seconds is proving that Cage couldn't care less. All the same, that movie's popularity seems to have finally brought another Cage film to Canberra. Good thing, because Bringing Out the Dead (which has been playing in Sydney for months) is almost a return to his better days.

It doesn't hurt that it's made by the dynamic duo of writer Paul Schrader (adapting Joe Connelly's novel) and director Martin Scorsese, the team that gave us Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Of course, Scorsese has a reputation as the master of realism, which is perhaps undeserved; the gritty world of his movies is as theatrical and overstated as any Hollywood schlock. But remember the old wisdom: if it's dark and brooding, it must be realism.

With this film, Scorsese and Schrader revisit the grim New York of Taxi Driver, with Cage as a burnt-out, night-time paramedic on the verge of breakdown, accompanied by a group of medics in varying states of madness, including John Goodman, Ving Rhames (a wonderfully funny performance), and the excellent Tom Sizemore as a wild maniac. It's undeniably dark, but it's also very funny and at times surreal.

Judging from the film, Connelly's novel was a Hells Kitchen version of Catch-22. The moments when Cage argues with his supervisor (Cliff Curtis), demanding to be fired before he goes crazy, are hilarious. Another scene, in which Cage and Rhames walk out of a dramatic ambulance crash unhurt, in true A-Team style, proves that, however dark, this is not exactly reality TV.

Yet Scorsese, in his usual effortless way, instils it with a mournful, poignant atmosphere, with Cage trapped in a world that is gradually driving him insane, and haunted by the ghosts of the many victims he failed to save. It seems to be a world without hope.

But even this world has hope, especially in the arms of a disenchanted but wilful Patricia Arquette. In the end, even Scorsese's world is simply a rougher side of the Hollywood dream.