Bringing out the dead

Herald Rating: * * * *

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore

Director: Martin Scorsese

Running time: 115 minutes

Rating: R16 (violence, offensive language, drug use)

Opens: Thursday, Village 12, Queen St

Review: Peter Calder


If the elegantly paced The Age of Innocence was Scorsese's most violent film (that's what he said), this hellish fantasia of Manhattan's Lower West Side, equal parts Dante and Fellini, could probably be seen as his most hopeful.

Adapted by Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver all those years ago) from the Joe Connelly novel, this film shows one of the medium's great masters at the peak of his game. It follows ambulance paramedic Frank Pierce (Cage) around Hell's Kitchen through three nights and two days in the company of three utterly different partners.

These are the same mean streets Travis Bickle navigated in his checkered cab in Taxi Driver, but the tempo is faster here. As the ambulance hisses along wet streets to the beat of Van Morrison's TB Sheets, the camera closes on Pierce's cadaverous face and his eyes, bloodshot, black-ringed, windows to a soul in torment.

Through the lens of Robert Richardson, Oliver Stone's long-time director of photography, Manhattan is partly a wonderworld of tarmac whizzing by, glistening in the neon and tail lights, but equally often a frightening series of canyons and tunnels. It's no accident, perhaps, that whenever we see the sun it appears to be setting.

Much of the action takes place in the emergency room at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital (in one of the film's many bleak running gags, it's called Our Lady Of Misery) where human flesh is processed like so much meat. There are none of the glib, prime-time formulas here.

"They're fixed and dilated," says an admitting doctor of one patient's pupils. "This one's plant food."

Tormented by the people (one young Hispanic street kid in particular) he failed to save, Pierce is a modern Orpheus, seeking triumph over death in an above-ground underworld. The three days and two nights in his life make for a classical five-act structure and each of Pierce's three partners (Goodman, Rhames and Sizemore) illuminates his part.

The story's arc is unquestionably redemptive, even if it doesn't seem so. Pierce's tentative relationship with Mary (Arquette), the daughter of a comatose patient, seems like a subplot but by the closing minutes we realise that the chance of finding meaning in the mayhem is what the film has been about all the time.

Full of grand compositions and constructed with a bricklayer's precision, it's a bravura piece of work, but for all that it is oddly unmoving. One of the most impressive sequences has Pierce and Mary riding in silence in the back of the ambulance. For an instant we see humanity stripped of cinematic artifice, and there's magic there.

It's not that Scorsese's technique gets in the way of the film. The film is virtually nothing else. It's dazzling (often literally so) and it's a bit depressing, too. But it's not a film to be missed.

subhead: Heavy traffic HUMAN TRAFFIC HHH Cast: John Simm, Nicola Reynolds, Lorraine Pilkington, Danny Dyer, Shaun Parkes

Director: Justin Kerrigan

Rating: R18 (contains drug use, sex scenes and offensive language)

Running time: 94 minutes

Opens: Now showing, Rialto theatres

An apolitical party statement on behalf of Young People Today: "The weekend has landed. All that exists now is clubs, drugs, pubs and parties. I've got 48 hours off from the world, man. I gonna blow steam out of my head like a screaming kettle ... "

Catch the drift? Director Justin Kerrigan would like to think he has with his Trainspotting-goes-to-Cardiff-and-take-loads-of-Ecstasy tribute to rave culture.

Played out on the not very broad canvas of 48 hours in the Welsh capital, his first film is a short, sharp report on modern life seen through the bug eyes of a bunch of 20-somethings: Jip (Simm, seen in last year's television drama The Lakes), Lulu (Pilkington), Koop (Parkes), Moff (Dyer) and Nina (Reynolds).

The substance of the film is about taking substances to escape the drear of McJobs, dysfunctional families and something called reality.

Plotting is replaced - as befitting the subject matter - with stream of consciousness diatribes from Jip (as above) and the others on why straight culture (mums, dads and dead-end jobs) is naff while drugs, music and your mates are pukka.

It is more rant than rave (though the soundtrack will rattle your fillings and there's plenty of club and party life on show) with filming that's post-modern ad nauseam:

Characters talk to camera, subtitles cue you into the hidden meanings of conversations, there are slow-mo bits and sped-up bits, shouted monologues, imaged dialogues ... it becomes a bit tiring.

But the sheer bravura and energy of the E-type performances (particularly Dyer's comic turn) make it more than the sum of its borrowed parts.

The result is one part Bluffers' Guide to Young People Today, with the rest a homage to being callow, taking large amounts of chemicals, talking bollocks and having a damned fine time.

You can take it or leave it, man, the kids really don't care. But then they never have.