Bringing Out the Dead

Bringing Out the Dead, Martin Scorsese’s new movie, shows the anxiety and stress experienced by emergency medical service technicians as seen through a three nights-in-a-row shift for burned-out New York paramedic Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage). Five years on the job has taken its toll. Not to mention that Frank is seeing the ghost of a young homeless girl named Rose whose life he failed to save six months earlier.

A subplot features a story involving a heart attack victim whose life Frank does save. The man’s daughter, Mary (Patricia Arquette), a recovering junkie, starts a friendship with Frank as the two of them wait together in the emergency room of the hospital for word of her father’s fate.

Nicolas Cage’s performance in this movie is reminiscent of his Academy Award winning role in Leaving Las Vegas. But it’s the supporting cast that brings out the best in this film.

On night one, Frank’s ambulance partner is Larry (John Goodman), a portly gent whose mind seems focused on his dinner rather than saving patients. On night two, Larry is replaced by Marcus (Ving Rhames), a cigar chomping, gung-ho Christian. The best scene in the film by shows Larry convincing a group of stoners that it was the power of the Lord that brought back a young man from a heroin overdose, not the injection just given by Frank. On the third night, Frank rides shotgun to Walls (Tom Sizemore of Saving Private Ryan), who’s gone completely berserk.

There are also memorable apperances by Arthur Nascarella as the EMS supervisor and another by Afemo Omilami as a hospital security guard who insists on wearing his dark sunglasses indoors. He threatens unruly visitors with the line, "Don’t make me take my sunglasses off."

Like the Travis Bickle character in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Frank Pierce is a case study of a man who seems to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. The movie is a riveting, yet often times amusing portrait of what it’s like to reach the haunting edge of insanity.