Nicolas, Martin and Paul’s Ghosts After Midnight: The Ferociously Imperfect, Fiercely Alive ‘Bringing Out The Dead’

Martin Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942 in New York City — a metropolis that would go on to have a profound effect on the filmmaker’s creative output. He is one of modern cinema’s defining auteurs, and in honor of the director’s 73rd birthday, we’ve declared it Scorsese Week here at Decider. Click here to follow our coverage.

Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead is a black comic melodrama about paramedic Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), a tortured soul haunted by the tragic mistakes of his past. The film itself is haunted by ghosts. First and foremost, the film is haunted by its screenwriter (Paul Schrader) and director’s previous two collaborations, 1976’s Taxi Driver and 1980’s Raging Bull.

These are also punishingly dark character studies about men defined by the bruising excesses of their professions; lonely, lost men adrift in a world they do not understand and that does not understand them. But Bringing Out The Dead is also haunted by the men Scorsese and Schrader used to be and the world they used to inhabit — a coked-up, degenerate New York and Los Angeles of the 1970s where geniuses bent on complete self-destruction pursued oblivion and transcendent creation with the same feverish intensity.

That’s an awful lot of baggage for one film to carry, and Bringing Out The Dead, one of the biggest box office flops of Scorsese’s career (in part because movies like this most assuredly do not exist to make anyone money), certainly does not benefit from comparison to two of the most important American films of the past thirty years. And it’d be easier to defend Bringing Out The Dead as being its own tricky beast if it didn’t have such a strong Taxi Driver 2000: He’s Got An Ambulance Now! vibe to it.

Bringing Out The Dead suffers from the same affliction The Godfather Part III did: no matter how good it was, it could not be anywhere near as good as what came before. And Bringing Out The Dead is a ferociously imperfect film by design. It is intentionally too much. It makes excess a core component of its strategy. Bringing Out The Dead is too campy, too crazy, too over-the-top, too loopy, too pretentious, too groaning with literary ambition, and, all things considered, entirely too much.

But it is also a film that is ferociously alive, a darkly comic exploration of the pitch-black, tender heart of New York at its seediest that explores a few exceedingly eventful nights in the life of Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), a burnt out paramedic in early 1990s New York who is desperately in need of a hug, a bath, a stint in rehab for his alcoholism and a month-long nap or two.

Frank desperately needs a break to the point where he is actively campaigning to get fired but a warm body like his is too valuable to his perpetually overwhelmed employers to give up, so night after night Frank and his fellow paramedics are dispatched to save bodies and drunkenly, profanely pursue their own spiritual redemption.

The film’s sad-eyed, stoop-shouldered protagonist begins the film in a state of bone-deep exhaustion, so tired that he can’t go on and the film takes its odd but riveting tone from the strange, manic mania that sometimes ensues when someone goes without sleep for so long that they attain a weird second wind, an unexpected burst of punch-drunk energy that is its own odd altered state, but is also frequently the result of mood-altering drugs.

It’s a seedy valentine to a bygone New York that comes off like an urban, electric Sodom & Gommorah awash in lurid reds, blues and inky blacks as shot by frequent Scorsese (and Quentin Tarantino) cinematographer Robert Richardson. Bringing Out The Dead depicts New York as such a rancid hells cape that a suicidal character played by Marc Anthony’s fierce desire to die seems like a fairly responsible response to a life that has become unlivable, in a city that destroys its own.

Cage plays Frank as a ragged, raw nerve of a man, a fatalist haphazardly chasing his own oblivion because he’s not sure he deserves to be saved. Like Scorsese and Schrader’s previous collaborations, the film is intense and graphic in its Catholicism as it chronicles a man torn between a fierce desire to save and his compulsion to destroy himself.

Cage hadn’t devolved into self-parody at that point, and Scorsese makes smart use of the ocean-deep sadness in his eyes and the sense of danger and excess that characterizes so many of Cage’s best performances. Cage has rich stellar support in the form of scenery-chewing turns by Ving Rhames as a horn dog who’s never too hormonally overdriven to wax pious, and a wild-eyed Tom Sizemore as a madman of a medic who seemingly would be just as comfortable murdering the people in his ambulance as saving them.

Patricia Arquette, who was married to Cage at the time of the film’s release, costars as the drug-addled daughter of a sick man in a lumbering, symbolism-riddled subplot begging for the cutting room floor. Though Arquette can be brilliant in the right role, she’s uncharacteristically wan here, and that lack of presence is thrown into even sharper relief by the enjoyably hammy performances of Cage, Rhames and Sizemore.

Bringing Out The Dead is an electrifying mess of a movie, a kinetic rush of dark comedy and trippy, psychedelic imagery powered more by mood and raucous rock and roll energy than a rambling and episodic plot. The film’s considerable strengths are wrapped up in its formidable flaws. It’d be hard to imagine the history of American film without Taxi Driver or Raging Bull. It’s a whole lot easier to imagine it without the minor but hypnotic and resonant Bringing Out The Dead but folks riveted by the after hours New York world of sin and salvation Scorsese chronicles with such passion and confidence like myself are nevertheless glad that exists, flaws and all. After all, shouldn’t a film about the ferociously imperfect nature of man, even when blessed and cursed with a God-like gift to restore and save life, be imperfect itself?

Nathan Rabin (@Nathanrabin) is a freelance writer, the original head writer of The A.V Club, and the author of four books, most recently You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me as well a panelist on Movie Club With John Ridley, a basic cable movie review show hosted by the Academy-Award winning screenwriter of 12 Years A Slave. He lives in Marietta, Georgia with his wife, son and dog.