BRINGING OUT THE DEAD SCORCESE

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bringing_Out_the_Dead

Plot
Frank Pierce (Cage) is a paramedic working the graveyard shift in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, a neighborhood in New York City, during the early 1990s. It takes place over the course of three nights, each night pairing Pierce with a different partner (Goodman, Rhames, and Sizemore).
Complaining of burnout, Pierce suffers from insomnia and begins having visions of a young girl named Rose who died while under his care. Once called Father Frank for his ability to save lives, Pierce starts to fear that he will soon face another life he cannot save, and begins attempting to get fired as his visions of Rose become more frequent.
Soon, Pierce bonds with Mary (Arquette), the daughter of a heart attack victim whom he had previously saved, and who visits her father regularly at the hospital. Mary talks to Frank about her compassion toward helping others, which is shown contrasting Frank's feelings of burnout. It is through Mary that Frank is able to reconcile his feelings about Rose, and in the end, sleep, after sleeping with Mary and carrying out a mercy killing of her father.

Abstract (Document Summary)

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/courant/access/26907675.html?dids=26907675:26907675&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Mar+01%2C+1998&author=JOCELYN+MCCLURG&pub=Hartford+Courant&desc=%60BRINGING+OUT+THE+DEAD%27+VIVID%2C+OUT+OF+CONTROL&pqatl=google
If anyone is in desperate need of rescue, it's Frank Pierce, the edgy narrator of "Bringing Out the Dead." Burned-out is too mild a description for the ills that plague Frank after five years on the job in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen: He's constantly hung over, his wife has left him and he's wracked with guilt because he feels responsible for the death of an 18-year-old asthmatic girl named Rose.
Connelly, who was a medic in Hell's Kitchen (a section west of the theater district) for nearly a decade, writes with a frightening intensity that borders on surrealism. It's as though Travis Bickle from "Taxi Driver" has met the characters from Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
But Frank has hit a bad patch; his patients keep dying. And they haunt him, literally. "In the last year I had come to believe in such things as spirits leaving the body and not wanting to be put back, spirits angry at the awkward places death had left them." Rose, the girl Frank "helped to kill," haunts him more than any of the other ghosts that swirl around Hell's Kitchen. And so does Mona. The wife who abandoned him is now a ghostly presence as well.
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The movie is based on a novel by Joe Connelly, himself once a New York paramedic. The screenplay by Paul Schrader is another chapter in the most fruitful writer-director collaboration of the quarter century ("Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "The Last Temptation of Christ"). The film wisely has no real plot, because the paramedic's days have no beginning or goal, but are a limbo of extended horror. At one point, Frank hallucinates that he is helping pull people's bodies up out of the pavement, freeing them.To look at "Bringing Out the Dead"--to look, indeed, at almost any Scorsese film--is to be reminded that film can touch us urgently and deeply. Scorsese is never on autopilot, never panders, never sells out, always goes for broke; to watch his films is to see a man risking his talent, not simply exercising it. He makes movies as well as they can be made, and I agree with an observation on the Harry Knowles Web site: You can enjoy a Scorsese film with the sound off, or with the sound on and the picture off.Now look at "Bringing Out the Dead." Three days in Frank's life.The first day his co-pilot is Larry (John Goodman), who deals with the grief by focusing on where his next meal is coming from. To Larry, it's a job, and you can't let it get to you. Day two, Frank works with Marcus (Ving Rhames), who is a gospel Christian and uses emergencies as an opportunity to demonstrate the power of Jesus; bringing one man back to life, he presents it as a miracle. He drives as if he hopes to arrive at the scene of an accident by causing it. On the third day, the day Christ rose from the dead, Frank's partner is Walls (Tom Sizemore), who is coming apart at the seams and wreaks havoc on hapless patients.

Haunting Frank's thoughts as he cruises with these guys are two women. One is Rose, whose face peers up at him from every street corner. The other is Mary (Patricia Arquette), the daughter of the man who liked Sinatra. After her dad is transferred to an intensive care unit, his life, such as it is, consists of dying and being shocked back to life, 14 times one day, until Frank asks, "If he gets out, are you gonna follow him around with a defibrillator?" Mary is a former druggie, now clean and straight, and Frank--well, I was going to say he loves her, but this isn't one of those autopilot movies where the action hero has a romance in between the bloodshed. No, it's not love, it's need. He thinks they can save each other.Scorsese assembles the film as levels in an inferno. It contains some of his most brilliant sequences, particularly two visits to a high-rise drug house named the Oasis, where a dealer named Cy (Cliff Curtis) offers relief and surcease. Mary goes there one night when she cannot stand any more pain, and Frank follows to save her; that sets up a later sequence in which Frank treats Cy while he is dangling near death.All suffering ends at the same place, the emergency room of Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy (nickname: Perpetual Misry) where the receiving nurse (Mary Beth Hurt) knows most of the regulars by name.Nicolas Cage is an actor of great style and heedless emotional availability: He will go anywhere for a role, and this film is his best since "Leaving Las Vegas." I like the subtle way he and Scorsese embody what Frank has learned on the job, the little verbal formulas and quiet asides that help the bystanders at suffering. He embodies the tragedy of a man who has necessary work and is good at it, but in a job that is never, ever over.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19991022/REVIEWS/910220303/1023


"Bringing Out the Dead" is an antidote to the immature intoxication with violence in a film like "Fight Club." It is not fun to get hit, it is not redeeming to cause pain, it does not make you a man when you fight, because fights are an admission that you are not smart enough to survive by your wits. "Fight Club" makes a cartoon of the mean streets that Scorsese sees unblinkingly.

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v • d • eFilms by Martin Scorsese
1960s
Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967)
1970s
Boxcar Bertha (1972) • Mean Streets (1973) • Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) • Taxi Driver (1976) • New York, New York (1977)
1980s
Raging Bull (1980) • The King of Comedy (1983) • After Hours (1985) • The Color of Money (1986) • The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
1990s
Goodfellas (1990) • Cape Fear (1991) • The Age of Innocence (1993) • Casino (1995) • Kundun (1997) • Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
2000s
Gangs of New York (2002) • The Aviator (2004) • The Departed (2006)
2010s
Shutter Island (2010)
Shorts
What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963) • It's Not Just You, Murray! (1964) • The Big Shave (1967) • Bad (1987) • Life Lessons (1989) • The Key to Reserva (2007)
Documentaries
Street Scenes (1970) • Italianamerican (1974) • American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince (1978) • The Last Waltz (1978) • A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) • My Voyage to Italy (1999) • The Blues (2003) • No Direction Home (2005) • Shine a Light (2008)
Produced
You Can Count on Me (2000) • Nyfes (2004) • The Young Victoria (2009)