Martin Scorsese typically garners acclaim and notoriety for his flashy urban crime epics, awash in neon lights and cold hard cash, but bubbling underneath these surfaces is a dark, melancholic ethos that brings these aesthetics into question. His wealthy and/or greedy protagonists are not celebrated or praised, despite the riches they get to bathe in; instead, Scorsese is often interested in the darkness that supports them, embedded and manipulated throughout their world for individualistic aspirations. Bringing Out The Dead is a deeply important and fascinating entry into Scorsese’s filmography because it turns this metaphor inside out, and suddenly the chaos of the city, the bright lights glowing throughout the street no longer hinder this dark, dangerous core, but instead, they enhance it.
Bringing Out The Dead, released in 1999 and written by Paul Schrader, goes far bleaker than any Scorsese film thus far, not just in theme, but in visuals and aesthetic. It follows Nicolas Cage as Frank Pierce, a depressed insomniac paramedic in New York City. Bringing Out The Dead’s version of NYC, unlike the glamorous plunder in The Wolf of Wall Street or even the stylish sleeplessness in After Hours, is entirely unforgiving. Pierce is haunted deeply by a failed resuscitation in his past and the guilt of this plagues him deeply, as the film follows 48 hours of his nocturnal life, he can’t escape this panging guilt that rattles throughout him. But the film is not entirely about Pierce as a person, but about the world that he exists in, and the ways his work, his fears, and his past have consumed him.
The blinding horror of Bringing Out The Dead is an unexpected entry in Scorsese’s discography, making it one of his less popular films, but also one of his most fascinating. Each of Pierce’s encounters is more disturbing and harrowing than the last, deaths and tragedies deeply palpable and terrifying. Cage’s acting is masterful here, embodying the emotional dread as the nights drag on and the supernatural, harrowing visions become more powerful. Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing is sharp as ever, and Bringing Out The Dead is as riveting as it is heavy, where the exhausted and dreadful mood are tangible while the narrative still thrills incessantly. Like the rest of Scorsese’s filmography, his philosophies on life are striking and melancholic and bleak (and especially concerned with the frailty of mortality here), but not without glimmers of sweet humanity. Bringing Out The Dead doesn’t shy away from an inescapable bleakness, and doesn’t attempt to saturate it at all – the horrors of the film, whether from reality or nightmare, are entirely blatant. It is within this all-consuming darkness that we occasionally glimpse goodness, and however brief, these moments are still immensely significant.
Most of the lights in Bringing Out The Dead are dizzying and blinding, conveying a dreamlike, exhausted mood that refuses to relent. The effectiveness of the film is made even stronger in a theater; I first watched it at a midnight screening at the Coolidge and the experience (and the film, of course) has made a lasting impact on me. Scorsese’s works are best enjoyed with your full attention, and this is one of his most unique and effective films, and the visuals are so stylish and gritty. Bringing Out The Dead truly demands an unequivocal attention, as it envelops your senses and spins you into this nightmarish, dangerous world with little salvation and inescapable horrors, until it spits you out as something new.
Bringing Out the Dead
1999
dir. Martin Scorsese
121 min.
Screens on 35mm Tuesday, 8/27, 7:00 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Part of the repertory series: Out of Time 1999
