Martin Scorsese
Al di là della vita

Personally, I have always loved Scorsese: he is not only a versatile director, capable of maintaining a quality standard unimaginable for the vast majority of his colleagues, but he is also one of the few remaining representatives of that golden era of "New Hollywood" which, by adopting lessons from the Nouvelle Vague, redefined modern cinema, influencing it in multiple aspects. He spent the '70s leaving us masterpieces, the eighties opened with a bang ("Raging Bull") and then continued as his most difficult decade, between drugs and production problems for "The Last Temptation of Christ" with the addition of titles like "After Hours" and "The King of Comedy," little gems (especially the first), still today considered minor efforts from good Martin. Unlike his contemporaries (read Friedkin, Coppola, and De Palma, as well as others), Scorsese approached the new millennium without particular problems, and he remains one of the most anticipated directors every time a new work of his is announced. "Bringing Out the Dead" was released in 1999 and is the film that precedes the 2000s and the advent of the collaboration with DiCaprio.

Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) is a New York paramedic who seems to be haunted by the ghost of a girl who died of an overdose in his arms. Frank is the modern prototype of the alienated, the night worker who challenges the mazes of a wilted and rotten-edged Big Apple, surrounded by a series of crazy and out-of-the-box colleagues.

"Bringing Out the Dead" is the nocturnal diary of paramedic Frank, the tale of his fears and fragilities, of his desire to get fired because he is now devoid of the strength to react to the ugliness his job presents him with. A funereal tableau that Scorsese stages alongside Frank's figure with a multitude of homeless, various derelicts, addicts in general, the poor, heroin addicts, psychopaths. All the lowest of the low end up in his hands, those of an unstable man on the run from life and his work. A depiction of the New York that Scorsese has always loved (and in which he was born), the cinematic landscape of the film almost seems like that of a documentary on the misery of the world's most cosmopolitan city. The city that ridicules the lost, alienated, solitary, insecure man, just like Griffin Dunne's Paul in "After Hours."

Simply rehashing the theme would not be enough to condemn a Scorsese film, which is always a multi-layered and multifaceted work. The technical aspect is unassailable, as often happened in the long career of the Italo-American director: friend Schoonmaker's editing is perfect, as always, as is Scorsese's direction, which has never abandoned the dynamic realism of the seventies. The cinematography is disorienting like the overall climate of the film, even though the continuous search for the contrast between the darkness of exteriors and the dazzling light of interiors can be debated. This vast array of images and music combines with a sustained pace that engulfs the multifaceted abundance of characters and situations that follow one another without a solution of continuity, among overdoses, "relaxing pills," people impaled by railings, iconic succession of failures at work, transforming faces, coma voices, and so on. A disconnected picture emerges, full of half-things left somewhat unresolved (see the infatuation between Cage and Arquette) and the walking portrait of a paramedic dissatisfied with his inability to save lives. Those lives handed directly to him by the city: not the Mannian city that engulfs man, but the Scorsesean megalopolis that reproposes to the defeated man the defeats and failures of others. There is no "American dream" nor beauty in the New York of "Bringing Out the Dead."

From the post "Kundun" (1997) period, the film starring Cage is certainly his least known and loved by the general public. Among the fleeting flashes of irony emerges one of the darkest and most pessimistic episodes of Scorsese's long career, here poised between things already said (and better), the usual formal skill, and an underlying confusion that renders bland a potentially interesting starting idea (Joe Connelly).

5.5