A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Bringing Out the Dead

Date Viewed: 11/7/99

Details:

Nicholas Cage

Patricia Arquette

John Goodman

Ving Rhames

Tom Sizemore

Director: Martin Scorsese

Score: 0

The Review: Being an emergency medical technician (EMT) must be an extremely stressful job; and when your "beat" is Manhattan, it must even get a little weird on occasion, whenever it's not depressing. That is the starting point for this most recent film by Martin Scorsese, and it is truly bizarre most of the time. At its nadir, it borders on unwatchable.

Nicholas Cage is an EMT with visions; his grasp on the real world is minimal at best, and on a long night it will slip into fantasy or hallucination. He is haunted by the ghost of a patient who he could not save, and encounters her often. The film focuses on a few days in his life, bounded by the subplot of an older heart attack patient with whom he had some degree of success reviving. Now hospitalized, this patient has recovered enough to want to die, but cannot communicate it to anyone. The patient's daughter (Arquette) weaves in and out of Cage's life as they wander into and around the hospital.

Most disturbing, however, are Cage's interactions with his various ambulance partners (Goodman, Rhames, and Sizemore). Some of these are truly off-the-wall crazy, and none are a good advertisement for medical safety in the big city. Based on a first novel by Joe Connelly, who is an EMS technician in NYC, this film clearly knows whereof it speaks. But it speaks in tongues.

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