Bringing Out the (Best) Dead

Martin Scorsese’s late 90’s picture about an early 90’s NYC story, recounting a fading EMS worker’s tumultuous weekend, often gets lost in the discussion of his great films. Sandwiched between the Goodfellas/Casino gangster hysteria era and the perennial Oscar hype success of recent years, it’s easy to see why Bringing Out the Dead and its timely counterpart, Kundun, get overlooked.

But, BOTD is vintage Scorsese. In a review of the film, Chicago Sun Times movie critic Roger Ebert echoes an accurate claim about Scorsese pictures: “you can watch them with the sound off, or with a picture and no sound.” Truer words have not been spoken. Scorsese’s manic attention to the sound editing and his artistic approach to each shot make all of his films so dense that they drip with atmosphere. His name and pull in Hollywood have afforded him the opportunity to offer his treatment to period stories (The Aviator and Gangs of New York), but his style was created with Mean Streets, perfected for an Oscar in The Departed, and are on full display in BOTD.

Dead is Scorsese’s most recent, modern day, New York story to date and his vision of this New York (or more specifically, Hell’s Kitchen) is one of darkly despair. The film embodies, with great help from its sound, elements from a variety of genres. The voice-over work by star Nicholas Cage and the bluesy Van Morrison number (TB Sheets) suggests a noir-like quality, while other scenes – using a haunting original score – play almost like a horror film. But, overall this is a stylized film about Frank Pierce’s (Cage) troubled journey as he grapples with the sufferings and tensions of being the front line response in a city where horrendous scenes never end.

Scorsese again teams with screenwriter/director Paul Schrader to create Joe Connelly’s novel of the same name. The themes from the book seem to have resonated with Scorsese: that the city doesn’t discriminate when it comes to who it swallows and that in this community – rich with derelicts – Paramedics serve with a simultaneous disgust and sense of duty for their patients. Much like their previous collaboration, Taxi Driver, BOTD lacks a standard or structured plot but it doesn’t need it.

This story is all about sense of place, and nobody does it better than Scorsese. He needs only to provide us with an authentic look into the average shift of an EMS worker in NYC to create the sense of disorientation involved in the endless and inevitable horrors that the city reveals nightly.

Pierce is being haunted by the faces (mainly a young teen named Rose) of people he failed to save. Ironically as he explains this, his first call brings him to a cardiac case that is pronounced dead, but, due to Pierce’s treatment, survives to earn a trip to a municipal hospital ER where the waiting room plays more like a gen pop jail cell than anything else. This case also introduces Pierce (and the audience) to Mary (played by Patricia Arquette), daughter of the heart attack victim. Their resulting relationship does not evolve into a romantic endeavor, but rather illustrates their mutual desire to have somebody to lean on as they navigate the hostile waters of Hell’s Kitchen.

I know Scorsese loves NYC, but in his attempt to capture the true grit and griminess of this 3^rd shift world, he inadvertently glamorizes it and makes it look beautiful. His use of wet buildings, smoky streets, shadowy alleys, dungy ‘take out’ restaurants are so well done that you get the same feeling of those who occupy these quarters: that there is beauty in this chaos. It once again invokes that noir quality. Scorsese also makes good use of the living spaces and interiors of his characters. One apartment, aptly named the Oasis, has a hidden level of comfort for those who spend their time there. Scorsese excels in illustrating just how cramped and desolate some of these quarters can be, but given still, how they serve as a refuge to the hostility just outside their doors.

Along with Scorsese’s beautiful craftwork comes the great performances he expels from Ving Rhames, John Goodman, Tom Sizemore, Cage and Arquette. All of them are in top form hitting their various personalities pitch point. Pierce’s partners seem to be a base of sanity for his mental meanderings as well as a thorn in his side with each one crazier than the next.

Goodman plays Larry who is a blue collar blueprint of a municipal worker gaming his way up the pay and title scale hoping “to pass his captain’s exam” and secure a better pay and benefits for his family.

Rhames’ Marcus understands the spiritual dilemma Pierce is struggling with, but his own antics generally cloud his theological revelations.

Finally, Sizemore’s Tom is just plain crazy and reminds Pierce constantly of their old days together. Days Pierce would just as soon forget as Tom represents the dangers a failing and stagnant career as an EMS worker can offer.

Hidden in all of these great performances are several HBO character actors including a dying Michael Williams (Omar), a drugged up and eventually murdered Sonja Sohn (Kima), a caring nurse (Aida Turturro aka Janice Soprano) and finally a touching performance from Arthur J. Nascarella (Sopranos crew member Carlo Gervasi) who has a show stealing scene as Frank’s passive captain: “I promise. I’m going to fire you tomorrow.”

But the show stealer might be the performance logged by Latin music artist Marc Anthony. I had no clue who he was the first time I saw this picture and was impressed. After being introduced to his persona and ensuing music fame I was amazed that I still was won over by his work on BOTD.

All of the actors are on board and they need to be buckled in as Scorsese propels them through this frantic paced story which is matched only by his style. It’s been rumored that he schedules at least a year to edit his films with long time collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker and it isn’t disproved when you see the thousands of shots he uses to create this picture. The material from Connolly seems as scrambled as the visuals, but as mentioned before, the story doesn’t need to conclude a plot. It’s a sense of place. Hell’s Kitchen: Late 90’s.

Give Up the Crown?

It is a line uttered by the incarcerated, Baltimore drug kingpin Marlo, but it might be an adequate phrase for the creators to mull over. Only their crown is the greatest show on television. It didn’t matter that past television kingpins such as: The Sopranos, MASH, Seinfeld, and arguably many others all suffer the same fate as the drug lords of Baltimore– fading relevance over time. They wore the crown. But I feel that the WIRE’s true relevance is not yet revealed.

I have had many conversations with friends/fans of the show where I laid out my belief that the WIRE will be studied in most Universities and have come to find out, it already is. As far as the finale, many (better) critiques have been made over at THND and HH, but I will say that it does complete Simon’s vision of a literary fiction played across the television medium.

But like most great books, where you’ve invested a lot of your personal time into, the ending will almost never suffice. This isn’t to say that I’m unhappy with how the series ended, but I couldn’t help fighting off that nagging feeling that the Simon, Burns and Co. should have let this season breathe out to at least an additional episode. Too much seemed contrived in the wrapping up of several plotlines. And then it seemed to drift into an epilogue (before the final montage) of the character’s fates. And for a series that feasted on subtlety, Simon (who penned the finale to his creation) revered back to his S3 finale – wrapping up most loose ends – rushed through an extremely engaging Levy plot line, and spoon fed us a lot of the themes he and the fellow creators have been picking away at the last five years.

I understand that a city’s dysfunction is cyclical. I love the idea of completing the circle to leave us where we came in S1 episode 1, but the parallels were already in place. I didn’t need to see Dukie shoot up, Carver ascend to Lieutenant, Chris befriend Wee Bay, Michael become Omar. I’m sort of shocked that Burns and Simon didn’t co-write the finale.

Burns – who displayed his strength in his installments this season along with his phenomenal completed arc credit last season – seemed to be quietly selling his share of the WIRE investment over to Simon who has filled his datebook with many PR pressers and interviews.

While all of these conclusions of mine are pure opinion and observatory, I can’t help but wonder with Simon constantly having to explain his newspaper story arc in all of his interviews, that it didn’t convey itself well on screen. I understand the newspaper theme entirely. They were sweeping aside the very stories/people that we, as an audience, have come to care about over the years – or at least have become invested in. It’s what the Sun wasn’t covering that is the story of the WIRE. But, knowing the message doesn't mean that the arc was executed well.

In an interview with Alan Seipenwall, Simon reveals that he knew a few of these fabricating journalists the season portrays, but that no one he worked with did anything (out of fear of receiving the Alma/Gus treatment) to deter them, so this culture bred more selfish writers interested only in Pulitzers rather than a generation of reporters with integrity and journalistic skills and principles. Similar to the faulty practices that the police used, that Daniels despised, to teach its cadets.

Yet, Simon himself did nothing. He accepted a buyout. And that may be the hidden genius of the finale, as Matt Zoller Seitz points out, that Simon put the viewer (and most likely himself) in front of the mirror for this finale to answer the questions the first 59 hours raised.

For five seasons, "The Wire" has been saying, "Let's look at what's wrong with our institutions, how ossified they are, how unimaginative, how corrupt, how easily manipulated for personal gain, how paralyzed, how useless." And we sit there in the audience going, "Yes, yes, it's awful, just awful -- somebody should pay for this; somebody should do something." Then at some point we get so frustrated at the sight of talented and/or hardworking people ground down by institutions that we start to demand answers. "Why are things so bad? Why is change so difficult? Why to the same problems perpetuate themselves over and over in so many different institutions, so many social strata, so many walks of life?"

On answer to this, Simon holds up a mirror and says, "There's the problem right there. Look in the mirror, motherfucker. It's you. It's me. It's human nature. We as a species do not have the courage to take our medicine, to do the hard work that really needs to be done, to really expose corruption, stupidity and selfishness even when, especially when, doing so costs us something."

It's that last part that's really crucial. Almost every major character got tangled up in some sort of deception, or moral shortcut, in this season (or in some cases chickens from other seasons came home to roost). And their response -- even the "good" character's response -- has been, "What do I need to do, what do I need to give you, the accuser, to make this go away?" The answer is invariably, "Give me what I need to make MY problem go away."

That's the problem in a nutshell. It's not democracy. It's not the failings of the school system or city hall or the police department or the media. It's a moral failure that becomes an institutional and societal failure. Simon confronts his characters with the choice between doing the right thing and doing the expedient thing. Almost to a man and woman, they go with the expedient thing.

Things don’t change, because we – much like the characters – do what’s in our best interest. It’s almost like a bizarre reversal of Barack Obama’s campaign slogan: We are the constant that we fight against.

But with all my subjective Simon nitpicking aside, I am sincerely saddened that this era has come to a close and extremely thankful to Simon and Burns. Simon’s strongest accomplishment was knowing his vision and surrounding himself with great writers and surrendering his tapestry to their better needlework. It is a piece of art that will be revealed for years to come. I look forward to always owning all five seasons on DVD and (just like a great novel) popping them in and starting the cycle all over again. It’s all connected.