By Richard Ostrom

So we’ve come to the 1/3 mark on this year so lovingly tagged as the grand finale of our silly human race. Time to both touch on still another remarkable piece of bent cinema that may have underperformed and/or gotten the short bus treatment, taking it from theaters to home video (and accompanying obscurity) before its time, and also play catch up with a few choice releases (in brief) that have reared their ugly heads the first few months of this countdown to ultimate extinction.

This month’s film fit for reconsideration is elite urban provocateur Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead. The picture marks the director’s reunion with the dire and brutally surprising hellscape of what can now only be referred to as old school Manhattan. Along these mean streets skulked by raging bulls and taxi driving, xenophobic cretins, Scorsese now places the viewer alongside the frantic life vs. death job description in action that makes up the nightly grind of a swiftly burning down to mental nothing paramedic named Frank Pierce (embodied with bug-eyed, cartoon intensity by Nicolas Cage) as he strives against all manner of odds and unstable human beings (some of the worst of which are his co-workers) to break an extended losing streak when it comes to saving his fellow man on the job.

Hope springs forth, though it’s a long shot, in the form of a heart attack victim who ends up in coma-limbo (but not dead) and through which Frank meets and befriends his brooding, troubled daughter Mary (Patricia Arquette), a recovering drug addict who comes replete with demonic baggage of her own. Their fractional, skirting close to romantic interaction slyly suggests that Mary may just prove to be a sort of angel unaware for the eternally pained Frank, who carries among the cancers upon his conscious the memory of a baby-cheeked homeless girl named Rose who fell fatal pray to a seizure.  Hers is the ghost that haunts Frank most, her face becoming manifest across random people of the night and plying torment on the poor sap’s soul.

The centralized bond that slowly develops between Frank and Mary serves as a moral balancing beam for both parties as they traverse a wicked wasteland of pre-Rudy Guliani-whitewash Hell’s Kitchen and related vicinity New York. The style that Scorsese employes to realize the narrative derived from man in the know, Joe Connelly’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name (and eased into screenplay form by Scorsese familiar Paul Schrader), creates a hyper-real template that works on a level one step removed from a full throttle, chemical hallucination built of pulsating textures and blanketed by an omnipotent, otherworldly glow bleeding down across the entire proceedings. The picture presents this thick of Manhattan squalor as a mash up of documentary real and graphic novel pulp, the balance between accurate and illusory is often shifting at the protagonist’s expense. The predictably able cast eats up this material and spits it back out as a manic circus, be it within an emergency room full of bloody, filthy casualties or streetside with a rogue’s gallery of post-Reagan-era institutional castoffs soaking up the thick, blackened alleyways with ever hollow eyes in fervent search for anything remotely reminiscent of a soul.

Toiling time in an ambulance constantly racing to the next grand, tragic set piece (directed by a pair of jaded dispatchers voiced by Queen Latifah and Scorsese himself) are John Goodman as Larry, the initially stable family man with his heart on eventually commanding over an EMT unit all his own; too bad he reaches a melting point and vacates his post appropriately. Filling this void are both the absurdly righteous man of that old time religion, Marcus (Ving Rhames) and the hot-headed Tom (Tom Sizemore), who comes across mostly as a vulgar variant of a cartoonish playground bully jacked up on a heady dose of misanthropy. Neither of these two offer up any mark of improved support for Frank’s pained spirits, though Marcus has himself a fairly robust moment playing out the savior role for a batch of dope-addled goth puppies in one of the film’s many seedy, Dante Ferretti-supervised, sets. Gradually Frank finds himself easing closer to personal redemption and a save-of-face as he develops a bent sort of camaraderie with several eclectic peripheral characters, like the deliriously under hydrated Noel (Latin pop sensation, Marc Anthony) and even a creepy, laid back drug maven (Cliff Curtis) with a shady connect to Mary.

He finds ways to lend aid to both along the course of the seemingly endless nights on the emergency beat. Such events (and another involving an impromptu live birth) offer up hope to Frank that not all roads lead directly to a corpse.

The sad fact of the matter is, upon its release back in the fall of 1999, Bringing Out the Dead proved DOA on the big screen. I distinctly recall being in a sparsely populated theater opening weekend and watching a handful of the few that actually comprised the audience walk out. Pity, I mean I understand that point in 1999 was packed full of quality entries (Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Three Kings and so on), yet what Scorsese and his top-tier team of all-pro technicians (including, but not at all limited to; ace editor Thelma Schoonmaker, the aforementioned Ferretti and former Oliver Stone mainstay, cinematographer Robert Richardson) have realized is nothing shy of a masterful, neo-noir comic melodrama rife with the poetry of human character quirks and visions meant to remain on the brain long after the closing credits roll.  That this numbers among Martin Scorsese’s least regarded works (it stands well apart from the broad appeal ofGoodfellas or any of the four Leonardio DiCaprio collaborations and is probably more in equal measure with something far less considered, like The King of Comedy)is a shameful misgiving of simplistic commercial tastebuds stuck on auto pilot. Too bad, but it’s never too late to track it on down.