allyjack

I've rewatched a few Scorsese films lately, and without exception I think I enjoyed them more than I did first time round. I don't think I've always appreciated him enough. I've enjoyed the technique of course; enjoyed the energy and the impact and the tumbling intellect; I enjoyed "You talking to me?" and "I heard some things" and all that iconic stuff. But I think I was actually too young to appreciate the underlying complexity of the texts - Scorsese's extraordinary powers of analysis and organization. The ones I liked most - King Of Comedy, and The Color Of Money (which I haven't seen for a while but feel would still hold up as his most underrated work) - were in a way more accessibly sculptured, befitting their more austere thematic preoccupations and the mental landscapes of their protagonists.

Although Bringing Out The Dead is being regarded as a sort of contemporary revisit of Taxi Driver (the same writer, Paul Schrader; another troubled protagonist who works the night shift among the low life of New York City), it seems to echo The Color Of Money at least as much. In that film, Paul Newman was a former pool prodigy, far removed from his youthful vivacity, reduced to a smug wintry complacency. It was one of Scorsese's most sombre films, as precise yet in a way as abstract and self-contained as pool itself (near the start, Newman describes the essence of excellence at pool as "becoming someone...a student of human moves," but later realizes how such calculation stifles his art, such as it is). Some viewed Color Of Money as somewhat self-effacing (if not a hack studio job). Bringing Out The Dead has as haunted an air about it, but with a much more volatile - that is to say, typically Scorsese-esque edge.

The paramedic profession, as seen here, exists in an agonizing limbo - a frenzied witness to extreme pain and suffering, but lacking the relative power over life and death granted to the full-blown medics. A witness to too much horror, Cage (in his most wide-eyed, unnerving manner; a dream sequence relatively late on, where he imagines the dead emerging from the earth, reinforces the sense that he's almost vampirish in his gauntness) has become tortured by the notion of "spirits leaving the body and not wanting to be put back;" he now measures the city in ghosts per square foot. The film is crammed with religious and spiritual images and themes - from the somewhat ethereal lighting scheme, to the evangelical exuberance of one of his partners (Rhames), to an alleged virgin birth in one scene, to a near-crucifixion in another. At other times, the film often carries the sense of a world turned on its head, stripped of reason: Cage begs the chief to fire him, but the other won't comply, so Cage wearily keeps turning up for work; one disturbed patient will only climb into the ambulance as long as Cage assures him he'll be killed on reaching the hospital.

These devices seem far from subtle when I list them like that, and the film exhibits a rather narrow scope in its preoccupations and incidents. It keeps looping back to the same locations and characters; not just Arquette and her dying father, but to other patients encountered on successive nights. Compared to some other films, it has relatively little interest in evoking New York itself, confining itself to the narrow, sometimes almost disembodied territory of Cage's experience. But it doesn't seem overdone or didactic. And even though it builds, as did several of Scorsese's earlier movies, to a redemption-centered finale in which Cage alleviates at least some of his own suffering by tasting that power normally reserved to others, the tone as the film closes is distinctly restrained and muted.

If one insists on comparing it to Taxi Driver, then the earlier work has the greater bravado and panache - the Bernard Herrmann music and the operatic blood and the "You talking to me?" and all the rest adds up to almost too serendipitous a collection of highlights. It's possible to remember the film in fair detail while drawing a blank on what it was actually about. Schrader, in his film Light Sleeper, has already experimented with an older, more clear-sighted version of Taxi Driver, stripped of the almost romantic depiction of self-actualization and achievement. Bringing Out The Dead seems to be Scorsese's own reexploration of that territory. His technique is as fresh and spellbinding as ever - he uses the tools of cinema as comfortably as a steering wheel - but whereas Taxi Driver may have got away from him and become its own problematic myth, the new film is all his own.

Too much so for many viewers, for the film will not be a financial success. An uncharitable summary would be to say that the only difference between watching any given fifteen minutes of the movie and watching the whole thing is that the latter course takes eight times as long; that the film lacks passion and discovery and internal development. But Scorsese loves and reveres the great American directors (Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, etc.), and surely knows how many of those directors made films - at around his stage of life - which were regarded at the time merely as pale retreads of earlier and better works, but are now treasured as great mature, reflective masterpieces. Against that background, the relative failure of Bringing Out The Dead may all be part of a master plan. And if that's not so, if it's merely a failure and no more - well, after all he's done for us, I'd say he deserves a break.

Pretty disappointing movie just cries out for a rewrite, for an extensive rethink of what would have been worth concentrating on in a scenario such as this. The "big picture" aspects of the scenario are mainly confined to Freeman's exposition-oriented dialogue, yet his scenes provide only the merest hint of the political and personal anguish that drives his decisions. Otherwise the movie's focused on a few inexplicably bland personal stories - it's impossible to know why Leoni and her estranged parents were considered to be worthy of such attention. Despite the gravity of the situation, the movie maintains a pretty evenly bland tone, with an extreme failure to register tension - the ultimate saving of the world is almost anticlimatic. By far the best moments are the special effects-generated impact of the first comet - which are awesome in fact - but even these are undercut by cutting away to Wood's mediocre personal drama, not to mention simply by being too short. And of course, there's little sense of the huge loss that's been incurred by mankind nor of events in the world beyond. Independence Day was not only far zippier but actually managed in its bubble-gum way to convey a better sense of a comprehensive portrait of the event.