Hey folks, AICN regular, John Robie is back from a trip he took to steal... Well... until his fence moves it, I'm not about going to rat him out. But suffice to say he's back on active duty and on our list of agents bent on serving your desire for information and news from the films of tomorrow. This time out he reports in from a screening last night of BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, the latest from directing god, Martin Scorsese. My trouble with the following review is this... I get the sense that Johnny here, didn't like the movie, but his description of the film he saw and his analysis enthralls me. He's asking questions about what we as an audience should feel about Cage at the end of the film, and you know... I love open ended left to personal interpretation endings. Perhaps we are each meant to wonder about Cage. Maybe we feel he's had an arc as a character, and perhaps we'll feel he's merely walking in circles. I don't know... but the movie Robie describes has actually heightened my interest in seeing BRINGING OUT THE DEAD. To each their own, eh? Right. Here's the world's 2nd greatest cat-burglar...

Like Spanish by way of a Chinaman Martin Scorsese's new film Bringing out the Dead is at first painful and funny but ends up being just plain unintelligible. The film rambles and bops along for the first hour or so, precariously toeing the line between being a slice of psychosis and a depressing fable that promises to pan out with an ultimately striking look at one man's life. What's so surprising is that there's so much that's funny in the first half of the film. The humor here comes from the situation; these New York City ambulance drivers are like rubber bands stretched one millimeter from snapping, and when you're that wired some pretty sick things become funny. All that's left to do is laugh. Scorsese does a brilliant job of balancing the humor and the horror. For the first hour.

The film that was screened looked pretty much finished. The end credits weren't affixed yet, probably because they didn't have the time to sit down and type out all of Scott Rudin's assistants. There are fine performances here. Scorsese doubles as an ambulance dispatcher (in voice only), Ving Rhames is brilliant, Patricia Arquette might be very good but I'm not sure, John Goodman is terrific as always. Nicolas Cage has the look of a dead man for the greater part of the film. A few times crazy Cage breaks through the surface, and you're forced to pay attention to him. And that works. For the first hour.

Then there's the drug scene.

Note to prospective screenwriters: the trippy drug scene that happens about halfway through your script is probably going to be the weakest part of your story, and more often than not it will throw off the narrative, leaving it to spin in wild spirals towards an ugly death. In the drug scene here Cage walks through the empty streets of New York, pulling up the souls of dead people, granting them hope for life and calm. It looks like a Gap commercial.

From this point in the movie things spin wildly. Is Cage getting better? Is he getting worse? He seems like he's fine…oh, no, he's still messed up. He might be getting better….oh it looks like he's fine….oh no, gotcha, he's even worse than he was before. The problem here is that there's no leverage. We see Cage from the outset as low as a man can be. He maintains that low, then gets even lower, down to a point that doesn't even seem real. It doesn't seem real because we never got to see how Cage got brought down. We never get to see Cage the fresh-faced young medic, eager to help. We don't get to see Cage a year into the job, when he's starting to realize that there is a lot of ugliness in this world. We don't even get to see him when there's a glimmer of hope in his eyes, a desire to try to see the good in what he's doing. We start out with Cage wracked with guilt, with anger, with sadness and thoughts of death. And from there we go down. You don't have to be pedestrian and spell out the man's downfall, but asking the audience to understand all of Cage's baggage right away is asking a lot.

It's hard on the audience, and that's why Scorsese is so smart in that first hour to balance out the utterly abysmal vortex that is Cage's character with such humorous situations. It's also the downfall of the movie. In the end, how can we feel for a man who can't feel for himself? A few voiceovers that ponder the philosophy of his situation don't do it. Glimpses of a ghost of a girl he lost play a big part in the movie, but they don't pan out in the end. Cage is forgiven by the ghost, by himself, but for what? For figuring out that part of being a savior is granting mercy to oneself? That kind of comes across in the end, but there's so much meandering in the second hour of the movie that it's hard to swallow that dose of realization.

The scenes of the inner-city hospital are great, the drug kingpin scenes are not. There's no letdown with the visuals; even when a scene doesn't play out very well, as in a late scene on a rooftop with a dying drug dealer, it still looks stunning. Still there's something missing here, something very important. The film ends up being too detached for its own good. We can get by on dragging despair balanced with nervous laughter for only so long; after awhile it all bleeds together into real sadness. Cage might be a dark man of tin here, but there's no sense that he's been given life by the end of the film. He doesn't have a heart. He's only tricking himself, and us, into thinking he does.

John Robie
Expert Cat-Burglar