Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

	Directed by: Martin Scorsese	COUNTRY USA GENRE Drama NORWEGIAN TITLE Bringing Out the Dead RUNNING TIME 121 minutes
	Produced by: Barbara De Fina Scott Rubin
	Written by: Joe Connelly Paul Schrader

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Frank Pierce	Nicolas Cage
Mary Burke	Patricia Arquette
Larry	John Goodman	½
Marcus	Ving Rhames	½
Tom Wolls	Tom Sizemore
Noel	Marc Anthony	-
Cy Coates	Cliff Curtis	-
Doctor Hazmat	Nestor Serrano	-
Nurse Constance	Mary Beth Hurt	-

Review

Martin Scorsese is a filmmaker who always strives to get under the skin of the milieus and characters he portrays, often set in New York City. What’s been so remarkable about Scorsese’s NYC portrayals is how his combined disillusionment with and passion for the city always shine through. There is never a sentimental ending in a Scorsese film, and when it comes to the city and its characters, he has an unwavering desire to understand them – on a fundamental level.

His latest film, Bringing Out the Dead, embodies these very qualities. This is an unvarnished portrait of a rarely depicted milieu, and it certainly is psychologically complex at times. Still, Scorsese doesn’t quite achieve enough over the course of these two hours. As with Taxi Driver, he attempts to creep under the skin of his protagonist. The theme is once again how the brutality of the big city eats him up from within, and how he must find his own, private ways of coping with it. Surreal sequences and subtle hints of film noir are used to create atmosphere and reinforce the film’s themes. But our empathy for Frank Pierce remains limited – partly because we struggle to understand him (something Scorsese seems to have difficulty with, too), but perhaps most of all because the film focuses more on the depiction of the milieu and, ultimately, the mystery of the story. As a result, the lead character, played by Nicolas Cage, loses some of its dramatic weight, and the film’s conclusion in this area doesn’t quite align with how central it is to the overall narrative.

No one expects Scorsese to make conventional films, and that’s a good thing. But although he always has interesting stylistic, technical, and formal aspects on offer, he doesn’t always manage to tie it all together. Bringing Out the Dead is one such film: It contains a lot, but its narrative structure isn’t cohesive enough to merge its many ideas into a compelling whole.