Living with the Dead

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Frank Pierce's life is basically a high-speed pursuit of a state of grace that keeps eluding him. Frank, who in Martin Scorsese's new film Bringing Out the Dead is played in a sort of stunned frenzy by Nicolas Cage, is a New York City paramedic working Hell's Kitchen on the aptly named graveyard shift. He's been on the job too long, and lately its only compensation--the rush, the high of saving a life--has eluded him. He's famished, but he can't eat. He's exhausted, but his sleep is haunted, particularly by the vision of a young woman who died as he tried to bring her back from death.

Frank's desperation will remind some people of Taxi Driver--and, indeed, the movies share the same director, the same screenwriter (Paul Schrader) and the same ambiance (New York's night streets, teeming with hookers and junkies, quickened with the threat of sudden, pointless death). There is also, of course, the same sort of harsh yet slightly fantastical realism and the same sort of antisocial protagonist, who thinks his life might be justified if he could just leave these hellish streets behind. The fact that Frank's vantage point is, like Travis Bickle's, a moving vehicle (in Frank's case, an ambulance), from which one's perspective is hasty and incomplete, is another significant parallel.

But there's a key difference between the two characters. Travis was, at the least, a sociopath; Frank, no less than the people he tries to help, is a victim. The movie is powered by his yearning not just for usefulness but also for transcendence. He hungers for peace, meaningful contact and someplace he can rest and heal from the nightly horrors he sees on the job.

His best hope for that is Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette), daughter of a heart-attack victim Frank has brought into the hospital, where the man lingers between life and death and where Mary hangs out, awaiting his fate. In her repressed way, she's as strung out as the medic, and perhaps not good news for him. But she's the only hopeful news in sight, and their tentative flirtation keeps getting interrupted--by cardiac arrests in nightclubs, by the allegedly virgin birth of twins, by the running violence of an often half-naked street person (well played by the singer Marc Anthony, who sports dreadlocks for the role).

Even when nothing is doing, something is doing, for Frank's driver partners are all loony in different ways. John Goodman's false reasonableness, Ving Rhames' born-again religiosity, Tom Sizemore's addiction to violence--nothing about any of them can help Frank. The film is full of casual dark humor, but what's best about it is its resistance to the conventional three-act movie structure. Its string of incident is relentless, virtually undifferentiated, like life, and contains no promise of uplifting resolution. Bringing Out the Dead is like its title--blunt, truthful, uncompromising. It is hard on an audience, even harrowing. But that's exactly what Martin Scorsese was put on earth to do.

--By Richard Schickel