The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 8-14
Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
“Help others and you help yourself, that was my motto,” murmurs Frank (Nicolas Cage), a paramedic, “but I hadn’t saved anyone in months.” Vocations sometimes wear you down. They age you. Screenwriter Paul Schrader lamented the choice to cast Cage in a role he saw for a younger actor, one maybe in his twenties. But given the physical and emotional toll these types of jobs can have, especially on young folk, the hunched-over lurk and encircled eyes of Cage are irreplaceable. In the course of three overnight shifts, Scorsese and Schrader (previously teamed on Taxi Driver and Last Temptation, this being their final collaboration to date) guide us through yet another passion play of a man looking to save others and himself, no matter how much blood is shed. The ghoulish New York City of Bringing Out the Dead, based upon the accounts of real-life paramedic Joe Connelly, is one Scorsese often alludes to, but rarely explores. Upon seeing the film, one can understand why—this New York is bleakly hallucinatory, without any of the youthful awe of much of his work; the dark, blurry prism through which we see it is the kind informed by overworked nights and drunken, sleepless days. It’s scored by one of his best playlists—the Johnny Thunders track seems to haunt Frank, reminding him that he can neither embrace nor strangle his past. It’s also abetted by one of Scorsese’s strongest, most undersung casts: Cage, in all of his manic neuroses and awkward charm, is often unseated by Patricia Arquette, Marc Anthony, John Goodman, and Marty himself, dispatching strange calls to the medics that must nevertheless are based in truth. Though Silence has received adulation for rekindling Scorsese’s unrelenting spiritual guilt, he may have peaked with it here. Max Kyburz (March 11, 7pm; March 12, 1:30pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Scorsese retrospective)