Review: Martin Scorsese’s ‘Bringing Out the Dead’ on Paramount 4K UHD Blu-ray

Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead is a mélange of moods and genres ranging from Gothic horror to Bergmanesque spiritual rumination, and it shares the same maximalist approach that the filmmaker and cinematographer Robert Richardson brought to bear on 1995’s Casino. An account of sleep-deprived and burned-out paramedic Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) and his run of harrowing night shifts in Hell’s Kitchen, the film wastes little time in depicting Frank’s world as one of overdosing junkies and shooting victims, a place where hospitals suggest disaster zones, pulsing with the din of heart monitors and ever-raving patients.

So exhausting is this world that we meet Frank looking the way that Scorsese protagonists don’t usually look until the third act. That is, Cage enters the frame with sunken, bloodshot eyes and sallow skin. From the outset, it appears that the only thing preventing Frank from being hooked up to an IV and strapped to a gurney next to those he brings in is his EMT uniform.

Frank is defined by his insomnia-induced sense of instability, and to get that across, Richardson used ProMist filters and high-aperture settings to make every burst of light from a vehicle or streetlamp seem almost blinding in its intensity. The harsh glares also highlight the clinical white uniforms worn by Frank and the other EMTs, all the better to call attention to how the blood spatters that frequently coat their clothes dull their pristine cleanliness. This is a nightmarish job, so much so that the film’s funniest recurring joke consists of Frank actively daring his superior, Captain Barney (Arthur Nascarella), to fire him for insubordination but the captain keeps luring him into one more shift by promising to fire him tomorrow.

Once again working with a script by Paul Schrader, Scorsese effectively crafts a spiritual successor—and rejoinder—to 1976’s Taxi Driver, the pair’s epochal portrait of urban malaise. In that film, Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle fancied himself a savior of humanity, when really he was just a disaffected loner out to make the world hurt as much as he did. Travis concocts an elaborate power fantasy to deceive himself into feeling powerless despite the chauvinistic control he asserts over others throughout the film. Here, though, Frank is genuinely wracked by his powerlessness to stop death, often seeing ghostly visions of all those he could not save.

Travis at least gets to drive his own vehicle through the streets that he hates, as Frank is more often than not a passenger in his ambulances, either riding shotgun or holed up in the back with a patient as he tries to keep them alive, while the vehicle all the while careens around traffic trying to reach the hospital. The streets of New York City come into crystalline sharpness in Taxi Driver to reflect Travis’s predatory glare at the city’s denizens, but for Frank the city is just a blur of lights streaking past windows in his peripheral vision, forever out of his understanding.

Frank seems to gain a foothold of control over his life in the form of Mary (Patricia Arquette), a recovering heroin addict whose father Frank saved from cardiac arrest at the start of the film. As Mary’s father lies in the I.C.U., her visits to the hospital bring her into contact with Frank, and her increasing openness about her life and attempts to rebuild her broken existence fill him with an affection for her that ambiguously straddles the line between platonic and romantic attraction. The relationship that forms between them is one of Schrader’s best-ever realizations of his tangled interests in the physical and spiritual, and it gets wonderfully understated work from both Arquette and an uncharacteristically nuanced and soft-spoken Cage.

That’s not to say that Cage doesn’t get his trademark freak-out moments, but Bringing Out the Dead must surely stand as the first and only film in which the actor is the least outlandish element of the film. All around Frank, co-workers and patients, including a former friend of Mary’s memorably played by Marc Antony, behave as uninhibited, id-driven maniacs, which makes his own desperate attempt to maintain professional decorum feel that much more futile.

Capping off Scorsese’s most aesthetically experimental decade of work, Bringing Out the Dead is a freewheeling technical exercise that feels like the director’s most complete immersion into a character’s headspace. Through it all, the film is one of Scorsese’s most tender offerings, a tribute not only to the redemptive power of perseverance but, more personally, the belated show of gratitude by an asthmatic child to the medical professionals who helped him more than once as a sickly boy. Arguably, Scorsese wouldn’t tap into emotions this raw again until his autumnal streak of features that began nearly two decades later with Silence.

Image/Sound

Bringing Out the Dead never made it onto Blu-ray, so its leap from SDVD to native 4K is revelatory. Robert Richardson’s cinematography is finally rendered in all its explosive beauty, and inky, starless nights no longer suffer from digital crush. (Detail is so fine that you can now see every minute blotch of discoloration and patchy hair on Frank’s head.) The Dolby Atmos track is a marvel of controlled chaos, amplifying the barrage of street noise, overlapping dialogue, and eclectic soundtrack cues without letting any one aspect crowd out the other. This track is heavier on the treble tones of shrill sirens and patient screams than the bass, though the latter shines through in the roar of ambulance engines being gunned to irresponsible speeds.

Extras

Paramount digs up a number of on-set interviews with various cast and crew members that were never released on video. Conducted before the film’s release, these chats find Patricia Arquette, Ving Rhames, and others mostly gushing about getting to work with Martin Scorsese.

More substantive are a handful of new interviews with Scorsese, Richardson, Nicolas Cage, and Paul Schrader, who all look back on the project with obvious fondness and a measure of defensiveness over its muted reception. Scorsese, as is his wont, manages to sneak in personal memories and point to his cinematic inspirations in between discussion of production details. Meanwhile, Schrader amusingly details his collaborative relationship with Scorsese coming to an end on Bringing Out the Dead, as both recognized that Schrader had become too confident in his own voice as a director to let Scorsese steer the ship alone.

It’s Cage, though, who gives the most in-depth account of the production. Not only does he recount the fun he had watching movies in Scorsese’s private screening room, he also breaks down his approach to Frank Pierce and shares his read of the film’s themes and aesthetics.

Overall

Bringing Out the Dead, Martin Scorsese’s most underappreciated triumph to date, is ripe for rediscovery thanks to Paramount’s gorgeous 4K UHD release.