Bringing Out the Dead: Mother Always Said I Look Like a Priest
Hey, all you Cageheads! Cagenatics. Cageliebers. It’s been a hot while, hasn’t it? Well, life gets in the way and prevents people from watching Nicolas Cage movies sometimes. And other times you start to dream of Cage and decide to take a small break for your sanity. Sorry for the delay, and I’m glad to be back with a hot new Cage review for you.
Alright, Bringing Out the Dead is a heavy fucking movie. There is a LOT to unpack here.
Nicolas Cage plays Frank Pierce, a tired, disaffected paramedic who is becoming increasingly dissatisfied with his work and the impact he feels he has on his community. At the beginning of the movie, he rescues an elderly man who is having a heart attack and asks himself if any of the people he resuscitates resent him for having kept them alive.
Throughout the movie, he is paired with three separate partners. John Goodman plays Larry, a frustrated man who believes he deserves better than the lot that was given to him as a paramedic. Despite repeatedly asking to ignore calls, he dreams of becoming the captain and calling the shots. The second is Marcus, played in a standout performance by Ving Rhames. He’s a lecherous man who has no qualms lying, stealing, passing judgement, drinking on the job, and all the while claiming to be devoutly religious. He’s made his peace with his lot and is exploiting it for selfish reasons. The third partner is Tom Wolls, played by Tom Sizemore. He’s a cruel and violent man, more excited by the thought of blood at a scene than actually helping the individuals involved.
As Cage moves through the movie, he repeatedly encounters Mary (Patricia Arquette), the daughter of the man he saved at the beginning. As he’s questioning his own decisions, she talks about herself and helps him reaffirm some of the choices.
All the while, Cage is haunted by the ghost of a woman named Rose, a person he was unable to save earlier in his career.
There’s a ton of other plot stuff too, but holy crap, that’s already a lot going on.
This movie is swimming in Catholic iconography, both overt and subtle. From casual mentions of pizza places plopping portraits of Mary in their pies, to Ving Rhames pretending to be using faith healing on someone who’s overdosing as Cage sneaks him a shot of Narcan. The overall tone and themes of the movie seem to indicate that the paramedics act as reluctant, Sisyphean mediators between the dead and the afterlife. There’s an almost Bosch-like sense of chaos and hedonism in the Hell that is Scorsese’s NYC.
Cage’s character seems to be questioning the effectiveness of his profession, as well as whether or not he has any power over life and death himself. At one point he says that his father was a bus driver, and his mother was a nurse, and that he seems to be caught somewhere in the middle. This struggle persists, with Cage constantly attempting to act as a healer or saviour, but being relegated to the position of Charon, ferrying people from life into the hands of a higher power.
By the end of the movie, we’ve seen Cage’s character pushed back and forth between mania, depression, disassociation, and schizophrenic hallucinations before he takes the power of life and death into his own hands, unbeknownst to the doctors or nurses at the hospital.
The movie is painful and frustrating, especially for anyone who’s dealt with mental illness, addiction, or who’s just spent enough time around hospitals. There’s a beautiful attempt to find a middle ground between the science of saving people and the need for spirituality or some kind of emotional refuge when you cannot save somebody.
Scorsese is at his best portraying characters going through trials, flogging themselves trying to figure out what they should be doing with their lives and if their lives have value. Bringing Out the Dead is a fantastic example of this; this is Cage at his most aimless and frustrated. This is a character who is so lost, so frustrated with his life, that he suggests that he and a partner just go out and destroy things “just as a distraction.” Amidst the chaos and turmoil of New York City is a man who is struggling to hold himself together and prevent himself from tumbling into personal anarchy.
We hit a tight seven Cagemarks with BOtD.
Shirtlessness: This one always takes me be surprise. A pleasant surprise, but a surprise nonetheless.
Shaving: Cage’s face fuzz gets stubblier and stubblier, but no shaving in this one.
Cage Scream: Oh yeah, we get a huge one right as Cage comes out of a drug-induced slumber.
Over-acting: “I EAT! LARRY. I EAT!” God I love this man.
Under-acting: This is actually really important. Cage under-acts a lot of lines in this movie, but it acts to contribute to the sense of disassociation that he’s experiencing with his job. He talks about bleakness, past patients, and procedures with a grim disaffected drone that really hammers home how separated he is from his work. But heck yeah, there’s tons of under-acting in this one.
Des. Violence: Right off the bat, he’s describing a gunshot wound, and he continues to describe medical procedures and other violent acts.
Running: I’m not gonna give a point to this one because he at most breaks into a light jog. No running, which is actually super surprising. First movie since Bad Lieutenant where he doesn’t run.
Kissing: He plants a big ol’ wet one on Patricia Arquette’s cheek.
Bringing Out the Dead is a fascinating movie. It’s a little long, and it might be a little overwhelming in it’s religious motifs, but it’s a damn good movie that reveals itself to be denser and denser than it appears to be. There’s a lot going on here, and I’m definitely going to sit down and watch this one again in the near future.
May Nicolas Cage always be willing to give you mouth-to-mouth,
Nat
P.S. sneaky little cameo from Michael K. Williams, and I fucking KNEW that that dispatcher was Queen Latifah.
