Bringing Out the Dead at first divided us. It is an abstract piece of art depicting madness, death, despair, and homicidal mania amongst Emergency Medical Technicians (ambulance drivers) in the hellish bowels of New York City’s night streets full of junkies, whores, winos, pushers, violence, and general urban squalor and decay. Martin Scorsese, master of abstract symbolism for our darker side, directs with flourish and irony. Nicolas Cage plays Frank Pierce, a haunted driver whose eyes and subtle variations of shaded smiles express profound inner turmoil. Patricia Arquette plays Mary Burke, an ex-junky trying to be a too good girl, whose father succumbs to a heart attack in the opening scenes. Woven into the ambulance calls to various destinations of urban horror is the question about sustaining the old man with multiple heart shock treatments, potent drugs, and constant ventilator assisted breathing.

Craig thought the anguish, degradation, and despair depicted were insufficiently paid off to make it worth the misery Bringing Out the Dead forced us to experience. Of course, the "life is hell, and death often a release" theme can provide intense insights into our cinematic story experiences. In the end, though, Craig is most moved and satisfied when a film causes us to swell to a sense of mission to incorrect injustice, or to a sense of profound appreciation for what we have, even in the worst of times, or to a sense of tragic consequence and resolve to avoid the pitfalls of vice and to embrace virtue. Sometimes, weathering hell (in life and on the screen) can lead to exquisite hope, compassion, even faith. As quirky, intense, and in even insightful as Bringing Out the Dead may be, we both agree that this movie falls short of paying off on the level of thematic and emotional satisfaction.

Anna-Maria on the other hand marveled at the mastery of cinematic and acting technique that presented aspects of the human condition she had hardly imagined both in terms of the ambulance work in the deepest and darkest New York city night, and a kind of despair and blood lust she never experienced. Of course, we are both aware that the "reality" in movies (in this case ambulance work) should be taken with a grain if not a tablespoon of salt. After all, the action is intended to be metaphorical, not literal. Nonetheless, no matter how surreal the surroundings and situations in Bringing Out the Dead, their power is in their representation of a dark, ambiguous world, as hard to pin down as though we were Alice in a wonderland of urban hell.

As regular readers know, we are committed to finding a level of meaning and worth in the movies we review as well as to coming to some level of consensus between us. For us, the joy and dynamism of story involvement comes from the often difficult, even heated interchanges they inspire. This movie challenged us, perhaps because it is so abstract a piece of art -- distorted, jangling, in ways profoundly ugly, though obviously intentionally so. We suppose the best we can do for you, our friends and readers, is to state plainly that this movie is a challenge, but one worth taking on.

Both of our reactions are not necessarily incompatible. The movie has soaring moments of terror and intensity as the ambulance crews careen and jostle to get the bloodiest assignments from the dispatchers. As their psyches unravel, some of them become maniacal monsters. So where does this ride take us? To the leading characters in each other’s arms, not in bliss, but almost in a heap, with glaring backlight and a hope we know to be so very fragile that we almost wish it had never been entertained.

Cage’s Frank Pierce haunts us with his pained disengagement and depth of longing to again find the magic of saving lives. His performance captures grief, anguish, detachment, rage, and discombobulation while he deals with, among other specters, the recurring image of an 18 year old street girl who choked to death in his arms when Frank improperly inserted an air tube into her stomach no less than three times.

Arquette’s Mary Burke is scattered and equally haunted while she struggles with her hostility and sentiment toward her nearly dead father, hanging on by the thinnest of threads only because medical technology and staff assist persistently.

As do its two stars, this movie twists with dark ironies. There are the good hard drugs and the poison ones, the good pushers and the bad ones, the good junkies, the bad ones, and the pathetic ones. All of the doctors, nurses, security guards, ambulance drivers, people on the streets are flawed. Powerful visual images literally turn us upside down and every which way. The lurching ambulance filmed in enhanced speed and jagged photography creates visceral involvement. We are with Frank while he is trying to save a good drug pusher impaled on a spike that, although causing him considerable pain and blood loss, is keeping him from plunging to his death. This is one of the deeper, darker ironies of Scorsese’s intention: sometimes, something very bad is better than something much, much worse that it keeps us from falling into.

Ultimately, the movie weaves many themes, which are handled well enough by the master director Martin Scorsese. But, how much can we heap on one plate and still keep from choking with indigestion. Who are the dead? They are the living, the junkies, pushers, patients, nurses, doctors, and other EMT’s who populate this bleak urban world. Every major character is anesthetized with some drink, drug, neurosis, or insane withdrawal.

Yes, we laughed at some of the black humor. We cringed at the brutality. We wept a bit at the blight. We were hopeful for the lovers, though it would seem their fate was far from anything but a momentary, fragile relief from the sense of loss and doom around them.

Perhaps as its greatest achievement, this movie presents insight into the difficulties of dealing with someone who is alive only because he is in a hospital with the resources of modern medicine to constantly jolt him back to physical functioning. The shifting sympathies of the family and medical staff provide powerful commentary on the troubling realities of modern medical ethics.

We won’t give away how the question of life support is answered. We will say, though, that arriving at it became too easy because Frank telepathically hears the voice of the patient giving him clear instructions. Such a fantasy luxury is not afforded medical professionals and families who struggle with patients on the brink. That said, though, the film is a surreal antidote to modern hospital mythology in television’s ER and Chicago Hope, which all too often degenerate into soap opera.

We’ve mentioned the haunting performances of Nicolas Cage and Patricia Arquette, and we must applaud the wonderful work done by John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore, and others. Thank you all.