Bringing Out the Dead (1999) - Review

Bringing Out the Dead is a 1999 psychological drama directed by Martin Scorsese starring Nicolas Cage as Frank Pierce, a burnt-out paramedic in New York City, Patricia Arquette as Mary Burke, the daughter of a man who Frank and his ambulance partner saved from death, and John Goodman, Ving Rhames, and Tom Sizemore as his successive partners as the story unfolds. Frank is haunted by the frequent hallucination of a teen who he failed to save some months prior, while trying day by day to hold onto his sanity. 

I didn't think that watching this movie would constitute as studying going into my viewing, but it activated all of my attention. I was utterly captivated by this movie the entire runtime due to its relevance to my current studies. I frequently read about the secondary trauma response that builds up in medical professionals that leads to occupational burnout, and this film does an expert job at portraying the response through Nic Cage. It truly hit me hard when early on in the movie, his boss receives news from higher up in the chain that he needs to be fired because of his being late, not showing up for a shift, among other deserved reasons, however it does not reach that point of termination due to the lack of paramedics this person has to work NYC on a daily basis. Even when Frank is begging to be fired, he isn't because of the shortage of paramedics; Frank can't even quit because of the guilt that he has of not being able to save people for months on end. Another sad depiction of the healthcare industry, especially in a high-crime density area such as New York City, is the apathy that the staff in this small critical access community hospital have toward the patients that come in due to drugs and alcohol. The portrayal is a deep exaggeration of this apathy, but the attitudes shown in these small vignettes throughout the film are still present in healthcare, even decades later. There has been a push toward "compassionate care", or trying to remove the stigma of drug and alcohol use (illicit or otherwise) to give patients the dignity that they deserve in improving the patient's health. Not ever being present in the clinical hospital environment, but present in other healthcare environments, the dialogue throughout the was corny and over the top, but it spoke to the real life situations that healthcare workers of all kinds are faced with 24/7 and interested my academic side as the working conditions that we in my field and as society are trying to fix have always been present. 

I would expect nothing less of a great movie by a director with such a pedigree as Scorsese, but Bringing Out the Dead falls into Cage's filmography in a time where he has experienced a meteoric rise in success. Being familiar with Nic Cage's filmography for almost 12 years now, I never investigated this movie; I didn't even have an idea what this movie was about until I pulled it up on the streaming service. Nic Cage is not alien to portraying characters that suffer real life syndromes, and at the height of his action star popularity, he continued to involve himself in projects that show extremes of human emotions and experiences. He shows in Bringing Out the Dead that humanity is present in someone, even in the most broken of people. It is an important movie to watch if one wants to get a wide view of the human condition in film, and is a performance that those interested in Nicolas Cage as an actor would be remiss to leave out of their viewing.