Martin Scorsese
Al di là della vita

"It's not your fault. No one asked you to suffer, it was your idea"

The history of cinema is full of injustices, one of which is that Bringing Out the Dead is an underappreciated film and is considered a minor work of Scorsese. Nothing could be more wrong.

It is not his best film (The Age of Innocence and Casino are the two absolute masterpieces, for me), at times it may go a bit over the top, but Bringing Out the Dead is a very special work for me. It is the Scorsese film I have watched the most and the one I prefer among all. The one that gives me the most and, probably, touches more personal and intimate chords.
The first time I saw it was almost a decade ago. Few other films have the power to bring me back to the emotions I felt back then.

If Dostoevsky's Underground Man meets Céline's night: Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese, a story of a partnership that changed the history of cinema.

The journey to the end of the night by Scorsese and Schrader, spanning over twenty years of collaboration, indeed concludes here, with Bringing Out the Dead. In the night of New York's ghosts and spirits, of lost and angry souls that no longer want to stay within their respective shells of flesh and blood.

And just as with the closure of the circle between Abel Ferrara and Nicholas St. John with The Funeral, one cannot help but reflect on the concept of the "definitive film."

"I tended to block the worst calls, I'd forget them, but she wouldn't go away. Now she had come to testify for all those who were lost. These spirits were part of the job, it was impossible to pass a building without containing the spirit of something: the eyes of a corpse, the screams of a dear relative. All bodies leave a mark. You can't be close to someone who just died without feeling them. I could bear that, what haunted me now was wilder: spirits not born complete, murders, suicides, overdoses, accusing me of being there, a witness to a humiliation they could never forgive me."

The film is often compared to the first and more well-known of the Scorsese - Schrader duo, namely Taxi Driver. In common, the two (master)works have, indeed, this nocturnal odyssey, this hallucinated, visionary, and sleepless journey ("Never believe in men's unhappiness at first sight. Ask them if they can sleep. If so... Everything's fine. That's enough." - to cite indeed the first work of the immense French writer, who was a doctor, let us not forget) at the end of the New York night, amidst decay and ghosts in the metropolis, and the two protagonists also share something deep: they are two borderline personalities, two militaries (Frank is a paramedic, but still "trained" to keep composure in extreme situations and to leave everything on the margins) whose psyche is on the edge, an aspect recurring in Schrader's authorship.
However, despite this, the two personalities remain distant, almost at opposite ends.

"After a while, I came to understand that my role was not so much to save lives as it was to witness. I was a rag for the pain, all it took was for me to be present."

The film, despite some moments, as I said, excessive, shows on the whole a truly rare and magical balance between even extreme drama and irony, entertainment, poetry, and important reflections. The religious issue, as almost always with Scorsese, remains decisive, and the silence of God - which here translates into the fundamental irrelevance in the face of any kind of misery and tragedy - deafening, in a world full of symbolism but where the threshold between life and death is as fragile as the great sense of guilt for not having done more to save someone at the break of dawn.

Frank Pierce, in the end, is neither a saint nor a man aspiring to saintliness, but a man who would like to do good, and not being able to crushes him under the weight of frustration and his humanity and fragility. As well as the unbearable pain of what he goes through, touches, and to which he witnesses, precisely, as a witness. The final act will only be a definitive acknowledgment that, sometimes, nothing can be done and death is the only liberation from all this pain within a crazy and often senseless world.

"Most people don't die until the last moment; others start and take twenty years of advance and sometimes even more. These are the unhappy of the earth" - again, and lastly, Céline.
Even if the last journey of Scorsese and Schrader is ultimately less extreme than the first and not as nihilistic as that of the author of Journey to the End of the Night. A ray of light illuminates the last scene, which is among the most beautiful ever shot by Martin.

The film remains in the end an unconditional declaration of love for New York, despite everything. Just two years before September 11.

A note of merit for the stunning soundtrack and Nicolas Cage, who, when restrained (something that doesn't always happen), manages to be touching and convincing. Along with his memorable companions John Goodman, Ving Rhames, and Tom Sizemore. And of course Patricia Arquette, Cage's wife at the time.

A precious work that deserves to be rediscovered.