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Bringing out the dead: the films of 1999 By John Pavlus Oh, it was going to be such a good year. More than that--a phenomenal one, as if the cinematic cosmos were poised to align in some sort of Dark Crystal-esque Great Conjunction. As we all know, films take a long time to make-several years' time on average-which means that the constellation of filmmakers is always twinkling somewhat out-of-sync. While one director is premiering a film, another has one in development, while another is in the throes of production-all on their own respectively fluctuating schedules. But once in a while we of the moviegoing public get lucky. Like a line of cars whose turn signals fleetingly blink in a common rhythm before sliding into chaos again, the luminaries of American cinema occasionally unveil their latest opuses in an extended, escalating parade of moviemaking excellence. 1999's dream roster: Spike Lee. Clint Eastwood. Oliver Stone. Quality second-stringers like Neil Jordan and Mike Myers. And to top it off, a true once-in-a-lifetime triptych: George Lucas, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese, all unspooling their latest in a 'plex near you. Armchair cineastes nationwide were no doubt drooling all over their copies of Premiere in a state of anticipation-incurred catatonia. God, it was going to be a good year. What the hell happened? Call it bad luck. Call it overextended expectations. Call it a sign of the apocalypse. It doesn't really matter. One by one, the big boys stood, and one by one, they did not deliver. (Excepting Lee's Summer of Sam, which, despite some annoyingly heavy-handed moments, managed to squeak by.) Now it's November, and the last element of that filmic uber-troika, Scorsese's Bringing Out The Dead, has come and gone. A few last gasps of potential greatness remain to be seen--Stone's Any Given Sunday leading the pack--but after watching the heavyweights tumble to the mat, expectations are regrettably dim. You harbored high hopes for 1999, but now it's time to face the music: the lights are going down on prom night, and you're probably not going to score. But let's backtrack. Take a stroll through the multiplex morgue, ticking off the toe-tags: True Crime--never has Unforgiven seemed so woefully distant. In Dreams--A-list talent squandered on B-grade dreck. Austin 2 --Crammed so full of topical humor, you'll want to store the videotape in your vegetable crisper to extend its pathetic shelf life. But these were relatively minor casualties. Unexpected, disappointing, but not disheartening. No, it wasn't until midsummer that the death toll really turned grim. We all know what happened to the space opera. Episode Thud turned out to be the most highly anticipated video-game commercial ever made. Within hours of its release, critical flayings were already de rigueur in media outlets nationwide. For the year, it was only strike one-but it was strike one 22 years in the making, for god's sake. America's cinematic pied piper, the man who'd effortlessly carried our pop-cultural consciousness away on a ride we never wanted to end (not in that smarmy Ewok jamboree, anyway), had turned into...a hack. In a way, inevitable--but no less tragic. But then came July, with its own redefinition of that term, in the form of Eyes Wide Shut. Soon we were stuck with the uneasy task of which to deem the greater tragedy: that the world had lost Stanley Kubrick, or that he'd left such a painfully austere, bafflingly uneven film as his last word? Cinematographically gorgeous but little else, the maestro's swan song featured performances (excepting Nicole Kidman's) ranging from oddly wooden to downright ghastly, exterior production design near-laughable in its artificiality, and a shoo-in for selection of the year's most soul-withering musical motif. The film's hypnotically effective orgy sequence might have been redeeming, was it not utterly ruined at its peak by a zoom shot so damnably--dare I say it--amateurish that it seemed lifted from some subpar student film. Baby did a bad bad thing, all right-strike two. Things were starting to look dire in Mudville. Which brings us to the present: Following four months' mourning for the two already fallen, the last of three kings quietly arrived with his offering. Free of the near-Orwellian hype and press-fueled titillation of its respective predecessors, Bringing Out The Dead seemed to promise redemption. Nicolas Cage plays Frank Pierce, a hollowed husk of a paramedic whom we follow for 56 hours of EMT purgatory on the mean streets of pre-Giuliani Hell's Kitchen. To Pierce, saving lives is like "falling in love, the greatest day in the world," but he hasn't successfully rescued anyone in months, and he's ready to drop. His sick time is expired. His boss won't fire him. He's drinking too much. And to top it off, he's started seeing ghosts of Rose, an 18-year old girl who died in his arms, everywhere he goes. If Travis Bickle were around, these two would be pen pals. A tour-de-force of blistering pathos and diamond-sharp filmmaking was surely in store. Being that Scorsese's once again collaborating with screenwriter Paul Schrader to focus on a burned-out, lonely, nocturnally nomadic professional, comparisons with Taxi Driver are inevitable. But the sad truth is that the similarities run only skin deep. Where De Niro infused the outwardly pathetic Bickle with a subdued, burning-fuse intensity, Cage's Pierce just looks eternally hung over. With nothing going on behind his wasted, half-lidded eyes, Cage plays Pierce as utterly crushed from the get-go and takes him neither up nor down, regardless of what situation he's tackling or person he's talking to. In a film with no plot to speak of, such a flattened protagonist dulls the action to a stuporous pace--and halfway through Pierce's ordeal, you'll wish you could snatch one of his adrenaline needles off the screen and jam it through your heart. Pierce's usual partner has called in sick, so he's paired up with a different sidekick for each of Dead's three nights. Or perhaps "different caricature" would be more accurate. Scorsese inexplicably allows the respective characters of John Goodman, Ving Rhames, and Tom Sizemore (all reknowned for their characterizational skill) to degenerate into a rotating panel of superficial quirks-in-uniform. First up is Goodman as the pathetic idealist (he loves his job and aspires to be captain someday); next is Rhames as the comically incongruous Jesusfreak/hornball (he spouts religious platitudes and sexual come-ons to the dispatcher in the same breath); finally comes Sizemore as the sociopath-disguised-as-public-servant (he gets his kicks from tormenting and beating a mentally-challenged bum). To its credit, Dead does feature two effective performances-that of a suave, soft spoken drug dealer and an obstinate, crustily endearing captain-but compared with the rest, it's a classic case of "too little, too late." The film features most of Scorsese's well-worn tricks: wall-to-wall period pop music; dialogue peppered with whip pans and dolly moves; long, weaving Steadicam shots; an occasional freeze frame. But where such devices worked absolute magic in Casino and Goodfellas, here they come off somewhat half-hearted, as if the director is simply reminding us that "don't forget, this is a Martin Scorsese Picture." It's a testament to a director's level of investment when his film's most electrifying moments come as transitional shots focusing only on the speeding ambulance. (Designed by cinematographer Robert Richardson, not Scorsese, these trippy, fleeting glimpses capture the EMTs' mad midnight rushes brilliantly). While far from terrible, Bringing Out The Dead ultimately ends up feeling overlong, underacted, and generally half-assed. Which means: Strike three. Game over. Hit the showers. Maybe we expected too much. Nobody bats a thousand, not even the Hall-Of-Famers. But three swings, all air--that just hurts. And if expectations were high, they were rightfully so. It's not for nothing that the words "cinematic genius" are tossed around like so much salad when referring to these filmmakers. To witness such a sustained, disheartening procession when hopes were so high evokes an especially profound breed of disappointment like when you found out that "no, Virginia, there really ISN'T a Santa Claus." Disturbingly (yet unsurprisingly), many critics weren't interested in bravely acknowledging the clay feet of their cherished icons. Most could accept Lucas's demise-after all, he'd become more like Bill Gates than Akira Kurosawa in the last 20 years. But regarding Scorsese, and especially Kubrick, the critical reaction seemed embarassingly remniscent of a child covering his ears and singing to himself upon hearing something he doesn't want to believe. Admittedly, it's a hard thing to accept when the cinematic visionaries of the last three decades are rudely upstaged by theater-bred pretty boys (American Beauty) and music-video punks (Being John Malkovich). But (to put it just as rudely) that's progress, baby. It may not be pretty, but it's silly to ignore. As far as future redemption goes, it's a mixed bag: Kubrick, unfortunately not; Lucas, maybe; Scorsese, probably. They've been around long enough to recover from their blunders. But as for 1999-- I'll always look back on it as that sad season of bringing out the dead, all year long. John Pavlus is a senior film major at Ithaca College. |
