Nick Cage needs help ‘Bringing Out the Dead’

When you picture the face of a saint, you might not immediately arrive at the visage of Nicolas Cage. But that might change after watching “Bringing Out the Dead” (originally released in 1999) in which Cage stars as a perpetually exhausted EMT named Frank. His anesthetized eyes stare out into the night like the headlights of his graveyard shift ambulance, but he can’t stop saving people. He floats through New York City, which he says has “more ghosts per square foot” than any other place in the world. So it makes sense that Frank is stalked by visions of a young woman who died in his care — everyone he passes on his rounds brings her back into mind.

Frank’s flabbiest fellow angel is Larry (John Goodman) and in an early scene the partners make a sweat-soaked climb to a walkup apartment and blast a man in cardiac arrest with defibrillator paddles. Over some Chinese food minutes later, Larry reminisces with Frank about old calls, like the one resuscitation job that ended with a “mouthful of junkie puke.”

Given his outsized reputation, it’s notable that Cage doesn’t deliver the most gonzo performance in “Bringing Out the Dead”—that designation would belong to one of his hopped-up fellow actors, Ving Rhames or Tom Sizemore. The former plays Marcus, who’s high on God, and the later plays Tom, high on more controlled substances. When a club kid overdoses on a new opioid called Red Death, it perturbs Marcus, who’d prefer to continue his unsubtle flirtation with the velvet-voiced EMT dispatcher Love (Queen Latifah). Sizemore’s maniacal Tom does any number of unpardonable things, such as beating up a hapless neighborhood kid, Noel (Marc Anthony, hard to recognizable under full dreadlocks), for no reason at all.

In the film’s most perfect metaphor, the main EMT dispatcher is voiced by director Martin Scorsese, who chucklingly sends his men off on insane rescue missions. In this film, the most elaborate tracking shot doesn’t take us through the luxe Copacabana Club but instead the Our Lady of the Misery Hospital waiting room, full of howling addicts.

In his bleary-eyed spare time, Frank maintains a witching hour romance with Mary (Patricia Arquette), whom he met as he tried to revive her dying father, and shares harsh yet hilarious critiques of patients, such as, “This is the worst suicide attempt I’ve ever seen!” When Frank gives himself a B-vitamin and adrenaline cocktail in the ambulance, “Bringing Out the Dead” becomes a wobbly companion piece to Denis Johnson’s seminal book “Jesus’ Son.”

Shot high-up in public housing blocks or deep underground, the film is an unrelentingly nightmarish travail, but one that still holds a rollicking appeal. The director has deep insights into the feel of Hell’s Kitchen because Scorsese is not the greatest maker of mob pictures—he’s the greatest maker of New York pictures.