One day a rain came – and it washed all the scum off the streets. It really did come to pass. Some time in the last 10 years, the New York City of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver mutated into the present cleaner, safer, degothamised town with a crime record better than plenty of other places.
Whether it’s attributable to the investment of corporations like Disney in Times Square, to Mayor Giuliani’s zero-tolerance policing, or to a US-wide dropping off in levels of drug-related crime, things have certainly changed, and it is at once a symptom of this fact and its uneasy acknowledgement that Scorsese now brings out Bringing Out the Dead, the tale of a dark insomniac loner on the edge whose job requires him to drive all night past hooting prostitutes, but who this time is not the intense driver of a Checker cab – and Checker cabs themselves are now long gone – but an ambulanceman whose job is to bring help and succour to the needy. Once Marty himself rode in the back of Travis Bickle’s cab, brooding creepily about firing his Magnum into a woman’s “pussy”. In this picture, Scorsese is just the chirpy radio voice of the dispatcher, chivvying the ambulance drivers like an exasperated parent. What an almost Blairite revolution.
The picture is set in the early Nineties, the latest period in which a steamy, sleazy New York could plausibly be featured to retain some contemporary punch, and Nicolas Cage as Frank gives his usual drawn portrayal of equine dismay at every horrible little thing the city has to offer. His suffering, slack-jawed face is habitually radiant with sweat and sprinkled with blood. Driven pretty well barking mad through lack of sleep, he is haunted by the memory of Maria, an asthmatic street girl who he failed to rescue, and now seeks redemption – ever a key component of Scorsese’s screen theology – in attempting to save the life of a middle-aged heart attack victim: the father of Mary (Patricia Arquette) a dowdy, anxious girl clutching her cardigan about her, to whom he is strangely, mutely drawn.
Riding around town, Frank is partnered with a variety of others of the paramedic freemasonry: Marcus (Ving Rhames) a lascivious born-again Christian, the good-natured Larry (John Goodman) and the all-but-psychotic Walls (Tom Sizemore) who fantasises about assaulting the timewasters and faeces-encrusted winos he has to deal with.
There are, moreover, plenty of typical Scorsese touches, such as a raving nun roaming the streets with a model of an aborted foetus round her neck, addressing the fallen through her megaphone. The problem is that the blood, the guts, the hospital bureaucratic indifference, and the hell-hole of the emergency room do not excite or shock us as once they might, as the whole mise-en-scène is so familiar from TV shows on both sides of the Atlantic: both hospital dramas and the perennially popular “real-life emergency” soft documentary series. They have drawn the sting that Scorsese tries assiduously to reintroduce.
It is possible to sit through the entire film waiting for the killer Scorsese punch, waiting for the bolt of directorial lightning which will set this so-so episode of ER ablaze, and take it to a higher level of horror and insight: the next circle of hell. That coup never comes. But what does come is a pleasing, intermittent streak of broad, black comedy: stylish and well-observed, though not satisfactorily absorbed into what is obviously supposed to be a serious whole.
Every day, Frank fantasises about being fired from the job, and laying down his terrible burden without the responsibility of quitting. But his captain refuses to fire him, claiming that he himself is on the edge of insanity, and barking like a dog to prove it. Finally, Frank’s prayers are answered when his ambulance skids and turns over in the streets, almost killing him. He staggers out, laughing hysterically: “Oh thank you Jesus!” Cage’s paramedic has come to think of himself as wholly useless medically, but charged with discharging a spiritual responsibility: one whose purpose is to bear witness to suffering and be a “grief mop”.
In a faithless world, the paramedic is the atheist clergyman of the urban emergency, showing up with a bag like a priest ready to administer the last rites. It is a fascinating idea, performed with great verve by Cage and the cast, and nothing Scorsese does is ever less than interesting. But that whiff of danger, danger to bodies and to immortal souls, is absent.