So, I saw the movie Bringing Out the Dead was leaving HBO Max at the end of the month. I saw it had Nicholas Cage, and the title sounded like one of those goofy, one-off movies he has made quite a lot of before he got to his current level of a guy who does that but people finally get it. As such, I didn’t think much of it. I then noticed it was on my FIll-in Filmography and added it to my watchlist, still not sure if I would actually watch it or not. Sure, the plot description on HBO Max didn’t sound like some kind of forgettable action movie, and there are plenty of odd choices on the Fill-in Filmography.
Oh, but then I saw it was directed by Martin Scorsese, one of my favorite directors, and with a script by Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader, and I was somehow not really aware of that. As such, I figured I should see it.
Frank Pierce (Cage) is an EMT who, in his own words, hasn’t saved a life in months. He’s haunted by the ghosts of the people he failed to save, particularly a teenage girl that keeps giving him accusing glares. He hasn’t had any considerable time off in far too long, and Cage’s usual hangdog looks are actually worse since Frank can’t even get a good night’s sleep. Every day he goes into work, looking to be fired, but his boss says he can’t and keeps sending him out. His partners include the normal guy Larry (John Goodman), the religious Marcus (VIng Rhames), and the somewhat manic and somewhat violent Tom (Tom Sizemore). Frank needs something, but even he isn’t sure exactly what.
He might get it with help from his current case. After he and Larry rushed a cardiac arrest victim to an overcrowded hospital, he strikes up a friendship with the victim’s daughter (Patricia Arquette). The old man keeps needing a defibrillation and probably should be dead, but the doctors and nurses at the hospital keep reviving him despite the fact he can’t talk or even move that much. Over the course of the next few days, Frank meets a lot of eccentric people, and while they don’t all die, the ones who manage to live weren’t really in particularly great danger anyway. But his job is tiring, demoralizing, and not good for anyone’s mental health. Can Frank find some sense of peace?
Well, if anything, the movie very accurately reflects why Frank is burnt out. His calls are never pleasant. He’s not sleeping. The hospital is an overcrowded mess of people where there’s no room for new patients. And yeah, even when someone like Marcus can find hope after the two deliver a pair of twins to a teenage girl, Marcus’s twin is alive and healthy while Frank’s dies shortly after getting to the hospital. Factor in the ghosts and the gallows humor that he doesn’t seem to enjoy anymore. The editing gets more manic the longer the movie goes, and it isn’t all that surprising that someone like Frank would try just about anything to find some peace of mind and not really find it anywhere.
And I do mean anywhere. Unsurprisingly, Frank even tries some pills at one point, and while Arquette’s Mary seems to get something like a good couple hour’s sleep from them, Frank just sees all the people he couldn’t save. He’s a man who needs a break, and I’ll even give the movie credit that the relationship between Frank and Mary stays platonic throughout the film. I wish more movies would do that, honestly. I wouldn’t say this is as gripping as Taxi Driver or anything else in the upper echelon of Scorsese’s filmography, but as a somewhat forgotten minor gem, sure, I’d agree to that.
Grade: A-
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