Bringing Out the Dead (1999) * *

Directed by:  Martin Scorsese

Starring:  Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Cliff Curtis, Tom Sizemore, Marc Anthony

In Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, Frank Pierce (Cage) is a burned-out paramedic looking for any sort of relief from the nightly hell he witnesses.   He has seen it all, and now the ghosts of those he was unable to save are all he pictures in the faces of the living.   He can't sleep, he dreads going to work, and begs for his boss to fire him, which the boss would gladly do if he weren't short-handed.   So Frank goes out into the night with a variety of partners who all take a different approach to coping with the job. 

One night, Frank and his partner Larry (Goodman) encounter a Hell's Kitchen man lying on his bed after cardiac arrest.    Frank is somehow able to regain a pulse, but the man is still doomed to spend the rest of his days on a ventilator in the hospital.    Frank comforts the man's daughter Mary (Arquette), who has demons of her own, and rushes the man to the emergency room which is overflowing with poor souls needing urgent medical care, or at least think they do.   One such man is Noel (Anthony), a junkie with a scary look in his eyes strapped to a gurney.    Frank will see Noel again over the next three nights.

Larry copes with his stress by fixating on his next meal, while Frank sees the face of a homeless woman who died while Frank was trying to help her some months back.    This woman, for whatever reason, is the embodiment of his guilt.   What is his redemption?   Helping Mary find peace?  Helping Mary's father find peace?   It all tracks back to Mary, who Frank finds may be his only salvation and the only thing preventing him from losing all touch with reality.

Because Bringing Out the Dead starred Cage and was directed by Scorsese, it was a great disappointment that I didn't get more out of the movie than I did.    The setup is there for a potentially haunting, wound-up story which never gets moving.    Cage, who was once a brilliant actor before becoming a Hollywood punchline, has the look and demeanor down of someone who is on the edge, but presses on for reasons even he can't understand.    He's a sympathetic protagonist whose story is lost in a movie full of meandering dialogue and scenes which unravel without a payoff.    Even the climactic scene in which Frank lies on the bed while cradled in Mary's arms, doesn't have the power it should have because the journey to get there was simply too uneven.