Revisiting 1999: The Top Ten Films of the Year, #2 --- Bringing Out the Dead (Martin Scorsese)

Here's what I've covered so far...
 

The Top 10 Films of 1999:

Intro: Introduction: The Best Films of 1999

10 - The Limey (Steven Soderbergh)

9 - Affliction (Paul Schrader)

8- American Movie (Chris Smith)
7- Rosetta (The Dardenne Brothers)

6- Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze)

5- The Insider (Michael Mann)
4- Three Kings (David O. Russell)
3- Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson)


In a decade (specifically the years 1998 and 1999) most memorable for the new wave of American filmmakers, Martin Scorsese reminded all of us that even though the kids (Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell) may be sitting at the adult table, this old master won't be relinquishing his seat at the head anytime soon. Bringing Out the Dead is one of Scorsese's most memorable and manic pictures; filled with countless energy and the director's particular élan that reminded me of his 70's films that introduced the world to a crazy actor named DeNiro, needle drops, and a new way of looking at editing and camera movement. I admire a lot of Scorsese's films of the mid-80's (After Hours, King of Comedy, The Last Temptation of Christ) and early 90's (Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Casino), but it seems like Bringing Out the Dead is (arguably) his most energetic film since the 70's, and (again arguably) his most misunderstood and underrated film of the past 20 years.

The film is a manic two hours of smash cuts, zip pans, crazy tracking shots, an energetic soundtrack, and crazy performances…surprisingly not by Nicolas Cage. Cage gets a bit batty in some scenes as the overworked Frank, but for the most part he dials it down here as he plays a weary paramedic who is haunted by a pregnant teenager that died on his call. Throughout the night he rides with three different partners (John Goodman, Ving Rhames, and Tom Sizemore), each crazier than the last. Scorsese and his screenwriter Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) decide to script the film with any "real" plot, as the paramedics often have no real beginning or end to their long days on duty. This tactic works well in making us not just feel the craziness of the job, but also Cage's weariness as he is often bathed in shadows and donned with makeup that makes his eyes look sunken in.

Like any good Schrader/Scorsese collaboration the film is rich with religious allegory (the number three is prevalent as Frank has three co-pilots – or personalities – and we follow Frank through three days of his life, each inhabited by a different partner; and Frank befriends a drug addict named Mary, played by Patricia Arquette, who is shot in the Madonna pose at the end of the film comforting Frank), and one can't help but think that the writer and director aren't trying to evoke the same feeling they did with another film of theirs that took place in dingy streets of New York City, Taxi Driver. Like that film Bringing Out the Dead also has its lead actor narrate the story and lead the viewer through the streets of Hell's Kitchen, giving us an inventory of the destitute and hopelessness that inhabit the streets. Frank is like the river man, ferrying people to hell. However, even though the similarities are there, Schrader himself stated that the film wasn't exactly a sequel to Taxi Driver but more of a "bookend".

The aesthetic is typical Scorsese: harsh lighting, sped-up film, disorienting editing techniques (this is some of the best editing his longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker has done), and ethereal scenes that appropriately displace the viewer because the characters often don't know what's going to happen next. One of my favorite ethereal moments is where Frank, after taking some drugs, hallucinates that he is helping all of the ghosts of the people he's seen die rise up from under the ground.  As that scene ends Scorsese then gives us a drug-induced flashback to the one person Frank couldn't save, the aforementioned pregnant teenager Rose.  Scorsese employs a neat trick here where he films the scene backwards so it looks like the snow is fluttering towards the sky, instead of falling on the ground.  I couldn't help but think of James Joyce's "The Dead" during this scene, and Scorsese is obviously going for the same kind of effect (just in reverse): as Frank tries to save her life he is trying reverse death, hence the "backwards" snow.

 

  

  

 

In another one of my very favorite moments Frank is sitting next to Mary's dad who keeps dying but is being ordered by the family to remain "alive" because they want to "believe in miracles", even though it would make more sense to let the man pass on without the pain of having to be shocked back to life.  Frank can see that the man doesn't want to live anymore and to make things worse he begins to hear the man talk to him telling him to quit resurrecting him with the defibrillator.  Frank has had enough and seeks to ease Mary's pain that comes with waiting for such a miracle.  When Frank looks at her father one last time (Scorsese evokes another literary master who wrote about death, Dylan Thomas, by giving the scene a green hue to it) he finally lets him go in a scene of great power. Scorsese does something very subtle at first in this scene that compounds on the powerful moment: he dims the lighting on the old man and keeps the same lighting in tact on Frank. It's a masterful way of shooting someone's passing on, and at first I didn't quite notice it until I realized the scene had gotten darker, but when I went back and watched it again you could see Scorsese slowly dimming the lighting in the scene. It's a great effect that reminded me of the superimposed zoom he did in Goodfellas where Liotta and DeNiro are talking to each other in a diner and at first the scene just seems kind of "off", but then we realize that the characters are staying in the same shot in the foreground, but outside in the background the image is being zoomed in. It's moments like these that make Scorsese the king.

Bringing Out the Dead is the embodiment of what made 1999 such a memorable year. The film is teeming with energy. It's a joy to watch because like Goodfellas we're never quite sure where the camera is taking us and we're almost always energized by the music that accompanies each scene. The film has appropriately manic performances delivered by Tom Sizemore and Ving Rhames (there's a great scene where Rhames "resurrects" someone) and one of the better performances by Nicolas Cage as a man who clearly is burnt out and tired of a job he took because he thought he was going to be saving lives, not losing them. Scorsese shows Frank and his partners as glorified taxi drivers at times, and at other times they play a role that is more "consoler" than "life saver"; and that's what fascinated me about the film: it gave me a glimpse (a heavily stylized glimpse, but still a glimpse) into the night-to-night operations (the film is based on a book by Joe Connelly who was a NYC ambulance driver) of a profession I knew nothing about. It's one of Scorsese's most entertaining pictures, and I think it's a crime that it often goes forgotten when people discuss the great films of the master's oeuvre. It's the last great film Scorsese has made, and even though I know he has another great one in him, nothing has come close to the energy of Bringing Out the Dead.

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Revisiting 1999: The Top 10 Films of the Year, #9 --- Affliction (Paul Schrader)

Paul Schrader loves making films about men who have complexes. These Schrader protagonists are never likable characters – oh, they try to be, but they try so hard to be pleasant that they come off as repugnant or annoying. And I mean that as a compliment to Schrader’s writing and directing skills. Schrader is one of my ten favorite American directors…probably of all time. His films have a hypnotic pull to them that suck you into their themes of loneliness and discomfort. He’s created marginalized and pathetic, eager-to-please characters before, but maybe none more uncomfortable to watch than Wade (a brilliant performance by Nick Nolte) in his 1999 film Affliction (adapted from the novel by Russell Banks). Wade is a ferociously inept man, a sheriff of a small New Hampshire town, who instead of standing tall behind his badge and gun shrinks back – slumping throughout his day from mundane project to mundane project – and he’s always teetering between being the overly-apologetic do-gooder or exploding in fits of physical and verbal rage. It’s what makes Schrader’s film so memorable; a perfect mixture of Schrader’s experience with male characters like Wade, and a performance for the ages by Nick Nolte.



Affliction takes place in one of those isolated snow-drenched Russell Banks towns (he also wrote the haunting The Sweet Hereafter which also focuses its attention on a small town) that aptly supply the metaphorical setting for these characters. Wade is cold and detached, and his father Glenn (the great James Coburn) is icy – his skin almost looking frozen over from all the hard years of drinking. Wade and his brother Rolf (played by Schrader regular Willem Dafoe, who supplies the opening and closing narration, giving the film an appropriate feel of family lore or mythology) were abused as children. Their father was a brute (we’re privy to this through town gossip and flashbacks filmed in 8mm), an abuser who drank too much and thought little of his wife. Their mother has died (unbeknownst to Glenn, another example of how little attention he paid to her) and thus brings Rolf to town to deal with the situation alongside Wade.

Prior to the death of their mother is another subplot that I dare not give too much information about. There is a murder in the town, an action that revitalizes Wade and briefly wakes him up from his reverie of loathsomeness and ineptitude. Instead of trying too hard to please his young daughter and not piss off his ex-wife (like anyone who has been abused or is an abuser Wade always make a public show about how he’s not hurting their daughter, despite the fact that he is verbally abusing her by being so abrasive and smothering) he focuses his attention away from his familial problems (his father included) – and a bugger of a toothache – and tries to solve the murder that has taken place in town. For the first time Wade stands tall, but unfortunately it all devolves into an orgy of paranoia and rage as the more Wade uncovers the mystery, the closer he becomes a brute like his father. That’s all I really want to divulge about the subplot because in a bit of inspired storytelling we learn a lot about Wade, his brother, and the town through the procedural parts of the film.

Nolte plays Wade as a man always on edge. There are countless scenes in the film (and really we notice it form the onset in a conversation with his daughter) where we are never quite sure if this is the moment where Wade loses it. There’s a horribly sad scene where Wade is having a really bad day, but is hanging out with his young daughter. He forces her to have lunch with him, and when they get to the bar to eat he is smothering her and mispronouncing the word “grilled cheese”. The bartender, aware of Wade and his family’s history with alcoholism, corrects him in a snide way and pays the price for it as Wade snaps and pulls the bartender from behind the counter and onto the bar…right in front of his daughter. It’s a scary scene that shows Wade’s imbalance.

And what better actor to portray the unpredictable Wade than Nick Nolte? Nolte has had a great career with characters that are kind of dumpy and always teetering on the edge of sanity, but I really think that Affliction, and his role as Wade, has been the acme of his esteemed career. It’s the perfect character for Nolte: Wade is a balance of a guy you want to root for because he’s so inept and clueless, but he just won’t let you because he makes stupid move after stupid move. In one scene of impressive acting Nolte brusquely walks into his father’s house right as Wade’s girlfriend Margie, played by Sissy Spacek, storms out. Wade doesn’t ask Margie what’s wrong, instead he grabs a bottle of alcohol from his father and proceeds to remove an achy tooth that has been driving him crazy throughout the film. It’s a repulsive scene because he repeatedly ignored his friends and Margie’s requests to get the tooth checked out, but Nolte plays it in the middle: he’s both maniacal in actions (I mean who the hell would do that?) and shows a bit of tenderness in the scene – the only way, it seems, he can feel anything is to inflict pain upon himself.

The reason why he is so numb and left to feel worthless is because of his alcoholic father Glenn. In an inspired piece of casting Schrader decided to go with B-movie actor James Coburn as Glenn. Schrader liked Coburn because he wanted someone who could tower over the already impressive presence of Nolte. Coburn plays Glenn with a detached eeriness, and we see signs of him in Wade as the film progresses. There is a moment where nothing has gone right for Wade, and we slowly begin to see him devolve into his father (though, he never makes the full transformation) as he witnesses Margie gathering her things from his house in an attempt to move away from the sickness that is Wade’s family. Wade has just returned from the botched lunch effort with his daughter and begins to forcefully hug Margie in a lame attempt to get her to stay. Wade’s daughter sees this as him “hurting” her, so she begins to attack Wade until he pushes her off, bloodying her nose in the process. After Margie leaves with Wade’s daughter Glenn comes out and smiles with approval as he claims that he always knew Wade “had it in him”.

Affliction is a haunting film that shows Wade’s inability to break the cycle of abuse. Banks’ other novel The Sweet Hereafter was also about parental abuse, although more cerebral than the bluntly portrayed alcoholic Glenn. Both stories show the ramifications of abuse on the victims and how they get their payback. In The Sweet Hereafter the daughter’s payback to her father was just as cerebral as his acts on her. In Affliction, though, the final act is fitting for someone like Wade. There is nothing subtle about Wade or Glenn, so it’s befitting that the ending to their story (as told by Rolf through the narration) is more obvious than in Banks’ other famous novel.

Schrader had a great year in 1999 with the release of Affliction and Bringing Out the Dead which brought him and Scorsese together again as collaborators. I’ve always had a special affinity for Affliction. It’s a haunting, contemplative film with a great sense of place. The small New Hampshire town feels authentic, and the actions of Wade (thanks to the acting by Nolte) never seem too “out there”. Schrader always has a way of basing his films in an uncomfortable realty that forces the viewer to really look at the character of these people we’re watching and wait until the end until we decide whether or not they’re bad people and are to blame for their actions.

There aren’t a lot of filmmakers who take the time to cover such heavy themes as Schrader does. He reminds me of Bergman in a lot of ways: he has a subdued aesthetic, he loves loftier themes that deal with the religious or existential, and he loves simple establishing shots with a static camera where the mise-en-scene tells us everything we need to know about what the characters are feeling. Obviously I don’t think Schrader has put out the amount of quality that Bergman has, but their films seem akin in certain aspects, and I fully embrace that type of patient and subdued filmmaking in this A.D.D. era of filmmaking. Affliction is a small masterpiece. There’s nothing flashy about it, but boy does it sneak up on you and knock you out with its power. It’s one of Schrader’s best films.

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Counting Down the Zeroes 2002: Auto Focus

"Tell them sex is normal. I'm normal. People have these hang ups..."

This is what Bob Crane, a shell of his popular self, explains to his ex-agent at the end of Paul Schrader's Auto Focus. He has to tell himself that because he's so dense he can't see that his obsession with sex doesn't mesh with his obsession with being liked; he fails to see the conflict. Paul Schrader is at his best when he's profiling characters who will do anything to be liked. These are usually men, and the characters are often people who have a need, sometimes an obsession, to be understood and to be liked. Whether it be Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, Julian, or the subject of his brilliant 2002 film Auto Focus, Bob Crane, Schrader is a director obsessed with studying how these types of characters, and their need to be liked, leads to a lonely existence.

Auto Focus is not about Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) the television star, that much we already know, and Schrader wisely zips through that part of his life within the first 15 minuets. The film is more concerned with the Bob Crane who had an unending need to entertain and be liked. He doesn't want to disappoint anyone, and this is one of the main reasons he frequents strip clubs: he doesn't want to feel bad for turning down an invitation.

The bulk of the film is concerned with Crane's relationship with tech-head John Carpenter (Willem Defoe) who introduces Bob to the swingin' world of strip clubs, sex with multiple partners (their motto becomes "a day without sex is a day wasted"), and orgies. It's clear that the friendship he began with Carpenter was the catalyst for his own downfall, but what Schrader shows is also a man whose naivete put him in compromising situations. Crane was never embarrassed by his obsession with pornographic magazines, and in a scene where his first wife finds a stack hidden in the garage Crane explains that there's nothing to be ashamed of, "I'm a photo nut" he proclaims, as if he were looking at them for their artistic quality. That's the sadness that permeates every frame of the film: Crane is a man almost childlike in the way he sloughs off the fact that he's showing people naked pictures of girls ("not everyone looks at these things the way you do, Bob" his agent explains to him one day on the set of a Disney movie) or how he's playing the drums in strip clubs in order to "hone his craft".

Kinnear plays Crane as the lovable loser he was. He's all surface, never concerned about his own morals or ethics, because I don't think he ever thought about that; he just wanted to be liked and that came at whatever cost. Even when Crane's ego gets so big, as he becomes more and more comfortable with his suit of celebrity, he cannot help but berate his friend John Carpenter in the nicest possible way. There's also a moment where Crane, late in his career, is on some local cooking show and makes a disparaging remark to a women in the front row. It's a sad scene that shows how Crane's sexist humor is a product of a man who refuses to evolve; he thinks aloud and his thoughts of women aren't the same as those he has to work with. It shows how the obsession, the nightly immersion into amateur pornography clouded his mind resulting in tactlessness; he's involved with sex on a daily basis, so why shouldn't everyone else depersonalize sex the way he does. It's a sad, telling scene that is common in these types of biopics, and Schrader shows the perfect amount of restraint with the scene, never going over-the-top with it; and Kinnear, too, who plays the scene perfectly as a man who is oblivious to his own idiocy.

There's another great scene at the beginning of the film where Crane is doing a press junket for the show and he's being interviewed by a radio host. Crane, a former radio host himself (that's how he broke into Hollywood) is looking forward to the interview. However, the interviewer asks him a rather snarky question: "so would you say that if you enjoyed World War II you'll really like Hogan's Heroes." Crane is taken aback for a moment as the interviewer gets up and leaves as Crane screams "you're an entertainer, you should understand." It's all about entertaining for Crane, and even though now in the not-so-sensitive time of 2009 it may seem silly to think that Hogan's Heroes was ever an entity to be taken seriously, but back then nothing like that had been done before, and the fact that Crane doesn't really question his enthusiasm for promoting his new comedic show about a concentration camp shows Crane as a man who dissected few situations, all he wanted was to be told he's a nice guy and that he's doing a good job. It's a brilliant performance that transcends apery -- sure Kinnear looks and acts like Crane, but he also shows the man as being someone who is walking the tightrope of debauchery and celebrity.

Defoe plays Carpenter for the sleaze that he was. A man who uses his niche, his understanding of technology to leech onto the leftovers of celebrities. He forms a bond with Crane because really, Crane is the only type of person someone like Carpenter can be friends with. Crane doesn't like to disappoint, and there come a few times in the film where you get the sense that Crane is going to pull the trigger on ending their friendship, but he looks at Carpenter's pathetic grin (a grin only Defoe can supply) and just can't do it. Carpenter is the ferryman ferrying Crane to the underworld of sleaze: orgies and amateur pornography all for the gratification of the aftermath -- Crane and Carpenter don't get off on the moment, they get off on watching it later. There's a telling scene where they are watching one of their hidden camera, homemade porn films where they try to guess which city the act took place in. Crane and Carpenter causally talk to each other as they both reach down their pants as Crane says "this is making me hot..." It's a sad, pitiful descent Crane makes, and he's ushered there by the sad, pitiful Carpenter.

Paul Schrader has written many of Martin Scorsese's best films and as one watches Auto Focus they feel like they're watching the prototype for a Scorsese film: humble beginnings, quick ascent to the top, tragic downfall. That's the career arc of Bob Crane, a star on television before his personal obsessions clouded his need to always be liked. Once he alienated all of his contacts, leaving him pretty much unhireable, he had no other choice, because of his need to be liked, but to cut ties with Carpenter, which ultimately led to his death in a hotel room in 1978.

Schrader is on the very short list of directors who always have my attention. He's extremely underrated as a director. His writing credentials are well documented, and really, he's responsible for what I think are Scrosese's best pictures (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Last Temptation of Christ, and Bringing Out the Dead). He's a filmmaker that has always been interested in showing characters that aren't always easy to take; they're often characters filled with flaws who are responsible for creating uncomfortable moments that make the viewer wince. However, Schrader writes about these characters as if they were case studies. He lets the audience contemplate their actions as they unfold in an authentic way. Schrader's films are never overwrought and are always interesting and deeply thought provoking; evoking themes you can find in most of his films and certainly in all of the pictures he's penned for Scorsese. Here his aesthetic is subdued and subtle: as the film begins he paints his images with a beautiful sheen evoking the hope and prominence Hollywood can offer; however, as the film progresses, and Crane devolves so does the films style as the last part of the film is filmed mostly in close-up with hand held cameras evoking the paranoia and grasping-for-acceptance mentality displayed by Crane at the end of his life.

Auto Focus is like a lot of Paul Schrader movies: a forgotten, or never seen, masterpiece. I love the biopic -- especially films that show me someones life I didn't know much about or an aspect of their life I didn't know much about -- it's one of my favorite genres. This was a natural marriage I think as Schrader, one of my favorite filmmakers, tackles one of my favorite genres. I think it's the best film of 2002.