Nicolas Cage Birthday Celebration: Bringing out the Dead

1999 Scorsese movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A paramedic in New York City loses his mind as he watches ghosts and tries his best to save souls. John Goodman changes his mind about the Chinese food.

"What's that?"

"It's three legs."

"That's too many!"

 

Nicolas Cage should consider himself lucky. There's only one person who gets special birthday recognition on this blog, and that's Cory. This, in fact, might be the highlight of the man's career. I wanted to watch a Cage movie on his birthday, and I hadn't seen this one. Now that I've seen it, I have no idea why I went over 13 years without seeing it. 

 

I'll get my gripe out of the way right off the bat--there was way too much music in this. I dug the Van Morrison played along with Scorcese's flashy images of New York bathed in colors. Van Morrison (I think just one song) fades in and out like you're losing radio reception, and wherever he pops up, it's appropriate. I could have done without the REM or Janes Addiction or The Who or 10,000 Maniacs though. That music might be timeless, but for me, it cements this in a very specific time and place. Plus, there were so many snippets of these songs that it sounded like somebody flipping the radio dial in the middle of songs just to be mean. Or in the case of 10,000 Maniacs, to be nice.

The first thought I had while watching this was, "What? A Nicolas Cage movie with narration?" The narration in this is especially poetic though and paints this wonderfully abstract picture of the character's mind. 

 

"Saving someone's life is like falling in love, the best drug in the world. For days, sometimes weeks afterward, you walk the streets, making infinite whatever you see. Once, for a few weeks, I couldn't feel the earth. Everything I touched became lighter. Horns played in my shoes. Flowers fell from my pockets. You wonder if you've become immortal, as if you've saved your own life as well. God has passed through you. Why deny it, that for a moment there, why deny that for a moment there, God was you?"

 

It's stylized 1st person narration for a stylized movie. I like it. And it just perfectly captures the thoughts of this poor dude wandering in this nightmarish limbo, an urban purgatory with ghosts, well-lit ghosts that occasionally boogie to Van Morrison songs. This movie looks so good, crisp when it needs to be crisp and more viscous when it needs to be viscous. Sometimes, the buildings and streets and skies and people are oily and indistinct, and you just have this white ghostly ambulance cutting through it all. Sometimes, things focus on the worn expressions and bad postures of these damned souls. It's all beautifully hideous, and Scorsese isn't shy about using the tricks of his trade to show us this world or how one man's mind is deteriorating as he moves through it. At times, it feels like too much, but it's an experience and a half. The birthday boy's performance is one of his better ones. Combined with Scorsese's trickery, Cage's acting perfectly shows this character's descent into madness. It's a more careful performance than you might expect from Cage although there are a couple of Nic Cage freak-outs ("Why's everything a cardiac arrest? Come on, people!" or his laugh after an accident involving the ambulance), but watching a Cage character gradually lose his mind is about as perfect as it gets for a fan of his work. Also shining in this E.R. on hallucinogenics: Ving Rhames as raucous Marcus with his sweet-talkin' and cries to Jesus; John Goodman as Cage's partner on the first night, a guy who just wants some food; Tom Sizemore as his absurdly vicious co-driver on the third night; an unrecognizable Marc Anthony, a guy I probably wouldn't recognize anyway; Arthur J. Nascarella, the barking (literally) captain; Mary Beth Hurt as a sarcastic nurse; and of course Afemo Omilami as Griss, a guy super-cool enough to be allowed to speak about himself in the third person. "Don't make me take off my sunglasses" might be my favorite line ever spoken by a guy named Griss in a movie. It all adds up to something that is devastating but at the same time enormously entertaining. There's a dark humor that's impossible to miss. Scorsese himself provides some of the chuckles as a dispatcher, sending the ambulance to help people with roaches in their ear, a man setting his pants on fire, a three car accident with "two taxis and a taxi," an elderly woman abducted by her own cat, and a man at the bus terminal who was shot three years ago but now says his arm hurts. 

 

I don't completely understand what this movie's about, but I'd love to see it again to piece things together. Three nights? A guy trying to save people? Is Cage's character a Christ figure? 

 

Other things I liked: 

 

1) I.B. Bangin. What a name!

2) The volcano art in that dude's apartment. I wonder if my wife would let me put something like that up.

3) As much as I hated the music, the song by The Cellos where a guy claims that he's "the Japanese sandman" is bitchin'.