Bringing Out The Dead

Paul Schrader wrote Bringing Out The Dead as well as Taxi Driver. Schrader also wrote Light Sleeper, a dark drama which he directed in 1991.

Is Frank, the haunted Ambulance man in Bringing Out The Dead, a reincarnated Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, or even a John Le Tour ten years on? Le Tour, played brilliantly by Willem Dafoe was the weary drug courier in Light Sleeper?

A strong argument could be made in that regard, but perhaps we could even go back to young Harvey Keitel, who played the mad younger brother to Robert DeNiro in Mean Streets in 1973 to call in links between classic movies.

Or should we just recognise Martin Scorcese’s (and Paul Schrader’s) ability to searingly depict the fitful underbelly of New York; the sadness, the desperation, the hard humour of it all.

It’s said that in response to adversity "Those that think laugh. Those that feel cry." But there is another, likely reaction. You could go mad. These Ambo’s, caught in the living hell of the underdogs of a big modern city, could well lose their sanity.

Frank (Nicolas Cage) has been driving these ambulances for five years and is going mad, perhaps. He’s faced with daily horrors and he’s seeing ghosts. A young woman called Rose had died in his arms 6 months before. Her face appears before him, repeatedly, and asks him why he let her die.

Frank is snapping, and needs support, understanding, a rest, to be fired. A man in a coma in hospital is able to mentally communicate with Frank. We start to wonder about the ethics of resuscitation and of modern medicine. We start to ponder on the fragility of life.

Frank’s co-workers aren’t too mentally healthy either, although perhaps predictably Larry, played by the obese John Goodman, in response to the carnage, concentrates on his next meal.

Marcus (Ving Rhames in yet another inspired performance) has been through and beyond the seeing ghosts stage. "They won’t go away you know" he shouts at Frank. He’s learnt to live with his terrors.

Then there’s Walls who’s played by Tom Sizemore as an absolute bastard madman, in charge of an ambulance. Some of the scenes between Walls and Frank, when the wheels are really coming off, are ridiculously crazy.

Patricia Arquette plays Mary who’s on the brink of failure, or at least of failing to survive this hell on earth. Drug Lord Cy (Cliff Curtis from Three Kings) isn’t likely to help.

As is Nicolas Cage as Frank. This is a more interesting, much more believable performance by Cage, much more convincing than his Academy Award winning turn in Leaving Las Vegas.

Scorcese has depicted a mad and bad urban sickness with courage and energy. A climactic, strange scene in an intensive care ward has to be seen to be believed.

Bringing Out The Dead will take most cinema goers out of their comfort zone into a wild, sometimes surreal flutter with the dead and dying. It’s challenging and sometimes surreal.