Bringing Out the Dead. 1999. USA. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Paul Schrader, based on the novel by Joe Connolly. With Nicholas Cage, Patricia Arquette, Ving Rhames, John Goodman. 35mm. 121 min.
The Taxi Driver team of Scorsese and Schrader returns to the nighttime streets of Manhattan for a manic drive-along with Frank Pierce, a burned-out EMT (Nicholas Cage) who’s trying (and, mostly, failing) to save lives and maintain his sanity. Cage is at his very best here, teetering between soulfully troubled and just plain unhinged, a decent man stuck in a Sisyphean cycle of death, violence, reckless driving, and sleep deprivation. He finds some measure of solace with Mary (Patricia Arquette, Cage’s then-wife), a fragile ex-junkie whose elderly father was resuscitated by Frank, only to fall into a coma. But can anything save Frank from the nightly grind? Scorsese reaches deep into his bag of tricks for this one, strapping the audience into the passenger seat for a whipcrack ride of dizzying camera movements and a soundtrack that veers from punk and reggae to Sinatra and Stravinsky.