John Goodman in Hell's Kitchen

I really don’t have much to say about Bringing Out the Dead, an underrated movie that I am now about to underserve. After this, we are really in the home stretch, with only four stone cold classics to go, arguably my top four films in the #scorgayse filmography, certainly the four I’ve seen the most and have the deepest relationship with.

Bringing Out the Dead was sort of the end of the first half of Martin Scorsese’s career and it was something of a whimper in terms of cultural impact and audience reception, despite being a very good picture, if not a masterpiece. His next feature, Gangs of New York, was the first release where he was not just seen an overlooked artist outside of the system, fighting for his place, but he was really now the grand master, the patron saint of American cinema. And every movie he’s released since then has been received as such, at least critically.

The film, the final script by Paul Schrader that Scorsese has directed, is about a paramedic, Frank (Nicholas Cage) who is haunted and talks about his hauntedness in voiceover and meets and falls in love with a damaged young woman, Mary (Patricia Arquette). If you’ve seen a Paul Schrader before, you know what this is (no shade to the film or to Schrader).

Frank is in purgatory every night, driving an ambulance around Hell’s Kitchen in the early 1990s, one of the darkest times economically in Manhattan, before former mayor (and newly bankrupted felon due to his criminal enterprises) Rudy Giuliani used fascism to Disney-fy the city—but that’s a whole other blog.

Frank can’t sleep during the day but he’s on the night shift, when things get really nutty—for him and everyone. He’s sick and begs Captain Barney every single day to fire him. “I’ll fire you tomorrow” is always the reply. He’s in hell! Scorsese’s love of the absurdist purgatory that is New York at night brings us a cast of kooky characters, like John Goodman, Ving Rhames, and Tom Sizemore as paramedic partners in the ambulance; Mary Beth Hurt as an emergency room doctor who berates the patients, and Janice Soprano aka Aida Turturro as a no-nonsense nurse; and, of course, Marc Anthony in dreadlocks as a heroin addict.

So we go round and round in circles in the dead of night in Manhattan, where Marcus (Rhames) gleefully crashes the ambulance, and a fish tank explodes, among other happenings, until Mary, the daughter of a heart attack victim that Frank drives to the emergency room, does finally fall in love with him. As I said I don’t really have a lot to say here, so I just want to give you a sense of the plot and then call it a day.

The only thing I do want to talk about with Bringing Out the Dead is the jaw-dropping cinematography by longtime Scorsese collaborator Robert Richardson. If you’d like a sense into my own filmmaking ideology, Richardson’s cinematography is probably closest to what I see in my head when I’m writing my own work, due no doubt to being a teenager when Kill Bill, The Aviator, and Inglourious Basterds¹ came out, movies that were and remain very special to me.

There are opposing forces in the way the film is shot at every moment, giving every shot an underlying tension. Everything is brazenly overlit, too stark, ugly even. But the camera shoots these overlit scenes with a slight hazy focus, rendering everything both overstimulated and understimulated at once. The movie is an all too real nightmare, but it’s also a warm and fuzzy dream. It is, I might imagine, an approximation of what it feels like to do a speedball—I wouldn’t know, I am a virgin.

Or, more accurately to the context this film, it is Frank’s mental state—over-caffeinated to get through the night after not sleeping for days on end. Every shot evokes the feeling of when you didn’t get enough sleep and you go into work hungover and the greenish fluorescent lights make you want to kill yourself. The whole movie feels like this. It’s magical.

That’s all I have to say. It’s Christmas. It’s a wonderful film that I never think about when I’m not watching, but when I am watching, I keep thinking, wow, this is so good. Maybe you and your loved ones can do the same. 

1. Yes, I was actually 20 when Inglourious Basterds came out, okay?