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Scorsese films the ambulance runs with brilliant, jittery fury: speeding up the film, streaking the colors, gunning the movie forward with amphetamine bliss. And as always, he uses pop music as a hectoring Greek chorus: When Frank rides with diffident lug Larry (John Goodman), the sickroom blues of Van Morrison's ''T.B. Sheets'' uncoils from the soundtrack; when his partner is the happy, racist psychopath Major Tom (Tom Sizemore), early Clash songs fuel the scenes. The sequences are as electrifying as anything Scorsese has ever filmed.

In the end, though, Bringing Out the Dead belongs more to Paul Schrader. Frank's search for redemption is an internal one, played out mostly through Cage's sepulchral voice-overs — a device that only brings out this actor's sizable pretentiousness — and in his flickering romance with Mary (Patricia Arquette, Cage's wife), the heart attack victim's ex-junkie daughter. Whenever these two are on screen together, the film reaches back to an older New York movie tradition of classics like On the Waterfront — but only in a faded, thirdhand way. Elmer Bernstein's traditional score sighs in the background, Arquette stares at her shoes like a fallen Eva Marie Saint, and the film turns limp and directionless.

The movie gets a temporary boost, though, when Frank goes to rescue Mary from a drug den. As the velvet-toned dealer Cy, the phenomenal New Zealand actor Cliff Curtis is the first voice of reason the hero has heard in months, and so what if the peace he is offering is pharmaceutical and ruinous? That Frank takes him up on the offer, in ways both expected and unexpected, provides Bringing Out the Dead with a satisfying moral complexity, but it's one that works more in your head than on the screen. Where Travis Bickle once stormed into a pimp's apartment bearing death, Frank Pierce returns to Cy's flat to bring him back to life. Somehow, sadly, that makes for a lesser movie. B-

Originally posted Oct 29, 1999 Published in issue #509 Oct 29, 1999 Order article reprints
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