'Dead' marks a return to form for Scorsese

Blake Aued
dm senior Staff writer

Scorsese is back. After two sub-par films (the overlong "Casino" and "Kundun," which received good reviews but no viewers), Marty the Man has returned to form with "Bringing Out the Dead," the sort of artsy-yet-entertaining film that made him famous.

Teaming up once again with Paul Schrader, the screenwriter behind "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull," Scorsese has produced a flawed, but still excellent and surprisingly funny, film.

Nicolas Cage plays the lead role as Frank Pierce, an ambulance driver who once found his job spiritually rewarding, but is sent spiralling into madness by a string of people he couldn't save.

As the film opens, Frank is haggard and depressed by what he perceives as his failure on the job. His patients keep dying, and the ones who do live long enough to make it to the hospital, face an emergency room that closely resembles Dante's ninth circle of Hell. Patients are routinely refused entrance due to overcrowding, are left unattended in dire pain and lectured to by burned-out doctors. Junkies mix with heart attack victims, and unwanted patients are kept at bay by a security guard whose big threat is "Don't make me take my sunglasses off."

Frank falls for the daughter of one of his "pickups," (in ambulance lingo) Mary Burke, decently played by Patricia Arquette. One of the flaws in the film is that their relationship never really picks up steam, nor is it made clear why Mary and Frank are attracted to each other.

He also begins to see and hear the ghosts of pickups whom he failed to save, especially a young girl named Rose. He sees Rose's face in the hookers on the street and hears her voice when doctors speak to him.

The whole Rose/ghost thing aside, this is also a really funny movie, the funniest Scorsese has done since "The Color of Money." It really picks up about a third of the way through, when Ving Rhames steals the show as one of Frank's partners, Marcus, a born-again, hooker-watching, gin-swilling driver who flirts incessantly with the female dispatcher and performs exorcisms on heroin addicts. Yet Marcus's antics fail to raise Frank's spirits.

Marcus is then replaced by Tom (Tom Sizemore), who is quite literally insane. He beats up his ambulance, as well as the occasional pickup, and has the crazy eyes of the Devil himself. Frank begins to become infected by Tom's madness. The spell breaks, though, when Tom nearly kills a frequent pickup, a drug addict named Noel (Marc Anthony), with a baseball bat.

Earlier in the film, several of the drivers had a discussion about giving mouth-to-mouth. Few of them ever did it. When Noel is beaten by Tom, Frank gives him mouth-to-mouth, and rediscovers his compassion.

Frank's redemption continues as he finally saves a life, that of a drug dealer named Cy. Cy had jumped from a 16th floor window and impaled himself on a balcony railing below. As welders cut him free, sparks fly gorgeously out into the night. When he receives forgiveness from Rose's ghost, the redemption is complete. Presented with the choice between Larry's cynicism, Marcus's callous good humor and Tom's madness, Frank rejects all three, instead recovering his satisfaction in saving lives.

The role of Frank Pierce was tailor-made for Cage, who excels at playing an essentially good person experiencing a crisis of faith (see his work in "Leaving Las Vegas").

Oh, yeah, it has a great soundtrack, too. Van Morrison, 10,000 Maniacs, The Clash and various Motown classics -- what more could you ask for? At times, though, the pop soundtrack makes the film seem like a big music video.

Despite an unconvincing love story and a somewhat rambling plot, "Bringing Out the Dead's" "Taxi Driver"-esque portrait of the filthy New York streets, a suprising amount of comic relief and Scorsese's trademark visual symbolism make this film well worth seeing. It may not rank with his classics, but mediocre Scorsese is still pretty dang good.

DM Movie Review

Bringing Out the Dead

Rated R

****

Director: Martin Scorsese

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore, Marc Anthony

Star Scale:

***** = "Taxi Driver"

* = Taxi drivers