Richard Alleva.

Scorsese's 'Bringing Out the Dead'

Here is a sequence from Bringing Out the Dead that occurs a third of the way through the film. It epitomizes what's right and what's wrong with Martin Scorsese's latest movie.

A couple of paramedics, Frank (Nicolas Cage) and Marcus (Ving Rhames) rush into an abandoned building to help a Hispanic woman give birth. But it's impossible that Maria is pregnant, the young man with her insists, she's a virgin, we haven't had sex together, we've been companions three years but we're both virgins!

Twins are born, one male and alive, the other female and dead. We're not told if the surviving infant is to be called Jesus but his identity isn't the point of the scene. What matters is that the self-torturing Frank, who's failed to rescue anyone for the past few weeks, delivers the dead baby, while Marcus, a jubilant, lecherous, God-fearing madman-saint who believes that saving lives is the greatest high imaginable, has once again scored a goal against death. Later, in the ambulance, Frank warns Marcus to get that smug look off his face, but the expression actor Rhames wears deserves a nobler word than "smug": His is the face of a wise baby who's just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, Literature, and Having a Dry Diaper. It's a blissful moment for one man and a torture of sweet envy for the other, and the combative rapport between dour Frank and Rabelaisian Marcus is one of the best things in this movie, psychologically true and ferociously comic.

But suppose the Hispanics had simply been a married couple, unwilling to apply for medical help for fear of revealing their illegal immigrant status. Suppose there had been no claim of virgin birth (which, as played, arouses no suspicion of insanity or religious fanaticism), and suppose the mother's name had been Carmen or Irma instead of Maria. Would that have changed the scene and its crucial point-that Frank's jinx continues while Marcus is on a roll? Not at all. What's good in the scene is grounded in the realistic observation of the ways men interact under pressure. The hokey symbolism of the virgin birth is strictly an excrescence.

When Bringing Out is going well, it works as a fine war movie works, as the funnier segments of The Big Red One or Saving Private Ryan worked, with pity rubbing elbows with anger, both emotions overarched by a kind of loving despair for the human condition. For, in a way, the paramedics- tormented Frank, jiving Marcus, middling Larry, psychotic Tom-are soldiers: Their war zone is New York City in the early nineties and their weapons are tubes, pumps, syringes, drugs, and defibrillators. The enemy? The enemy is the people they are trying to save-drug addicts overdosing, madmen holding broken bottles to their own jugulars, runaway kids dropping dead in the streets. This is familiar Scorsese territory: the neighborhoods of New York as the purlieus of hell.

But, alas, someone (if only his evil angel) has whispered into the director's ear, "You are the great Magic Realist of cinema, the Gabriel Garcia Marquez of New York, the Italo Calvino of Hollywood, and the most tortured Roman Catholic sensibility in the history of cinema (Shove over, Robert Bresson!)." And the powerful visual rhetoric that (in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, King of Comedy) was always anchored and certified by realism, is here preposterously inflated and vulgarized.

Thus, we get not only the virgin-birth gambit, but countless shots of prostitutes and drug addicts walking along sidewalks bathed in ghastly green and red light while Frank stares at them lugubriously from the window of his ambulance. Unnecessary, since one shot of a very pregnant prostitute's stomach bulging under her skin-tight slacks early in the film tells all we need to know of the squalor of street life, but Scorsese can't help nudging us-see, see! urban hell! Frank is guilt-stricken for failing to save a runaway girl called Rose from a fatal seizure, and so he (and we) keep spotting her visage superimposed on the faces of passers-by, a startling device the first and even the second and third time Scorsese uses it, but the director doesn't know when to stop, so that by the time he shows a whole crowd of people wearing Rose's face, the effect has become tiresome, even ludicrous. By the time Frank walks around in a waking dream pulling various lost souls out of manholes and other crevices in the asphalt, I was ready to shout at the screen, "Okay, okay, I get it, maestro! New York is the Inferno and you are the Dante of Rock 'n' Roll!" In fact, critics have been granting Scorsese titles like that ever since steam oozed out of manholes at the start of Taxi Driver, but things have reached a pretty pass when great filmmakers start believing their admirers.

Directors, like writers, ratchet up the rhetoric when their material is slight, and, for all its Dantesque brooding, Bringing Out lacks a substantial story. I assume that the novel on which Paul Schrader's script is based deals with the day-to-day difficulties of a paramedic's life and that we get to know the protagonist well just by observing him on the job. But though the mechanics of his work are fascinating to watch on screen (maneuvering equipment up narrow flights of steps, defibbing victims, etc. ), they don't, by themselves, give us access to the narrator's character. That's why Schrader has written internal monologues for Cage to recite, but they are dreadful, full of observations like, "The god of hellfire is not a role anyone wants to play," that manage to be simultaneously fruity and meaningless. A guilt complex has been invented for our hero, but we are never told what it is in the hero's past that makes him susceptible to guilt. (Well, he has had a Catholic education, but I've known Catholic schoolboys so free from guilt as to be downright sociopathic.) His love affair with a patient's daughter might have shed some light, but the conversations between the lovers are vapid and there's no chemistry between Nicolas Cage and Patricia Arquette: Their baleful stares cancel each other out and both their voices lapse into soulful monotones.

Some reviewers have opined that Frank is too much the pure observer to be interesting, but I don't agree. He rescues his sweetheart from a den of vice, singlehandedly saves two others from hideous deaths, then takes it upon himself to euthanize the heroine's father. There's nothing exactly inactive about Frank, there's just not enough going on beneath the activity. He's the Knight from Nowhere. (Possible defense: The action is allegorical; Frank is Everyman and therefore doesn't need psychology. To which I would respond: Allegorical heroes need allegorical landscapes, like the ones Bunyan's and Dante's heroes walk through. Bringing Out takes place in New York City nine years ago and any hero in such a specific locale must himself be defined with specifics before he can be invested with larger, abstract significance.)

Just as Wagner was able to perpetrate a Parsifal by playing fast and loose with Christian concepts, Scorsese has here made a pseudo-Catholic movie by playing fast and loose with Dantean imagery. The giveaway comes at the film's climax.

The heroine's father is under observation at the hospital for which Cage works. At first considered "plant food" because of the destruction of brain cells, the man now shows signs of mental as well as physical recovery. (Nota bene: The very last words the ER doctor speaks to Cage before the mercy killing are hopeful.) But Cage reads the old man's mind and the telepathic message is, Let me go! Pull the plug! And this is what Cage does. Is Scorsese portraying this as the act of a self-deceiving monomaniac? As the pitiable folly of a mentally and physically exhausted paramedic? Catholic reviewers and film teachers, embracing this movie as the latest instance of Monsignor Scorsese's deeply Christian artistry, will excuse that last act of euthanasia as irony or as compassionate realism (see, Scorsese is just showing what a man such as Frank would have done under the circumstances, but he's not endorsing it). But then they're going to have to explain away the bright, refulgent light in which Frank and his sweetheart sit and doze during the movie's final shot. Is that celestial-looking light a nimbus of irony? I think it's the director's blessing on his hero for having done the right thing.

Much of this film-the grim humor, the razor-sharp editing, most of the acting (especially by Tom Sizemore, Ving Rhames, and Clipp Curtis)-is exhilarating, but the Catholic elements are utterly bogus. As one papist regarding another, I hope that Scorsese comes to terms with his religion and finds peace within it. But as a critic judging the work of the man I still regard as the greatest American filmmaker, I wish Scorsese would become a Unitarian.