Bringing Out The Dead
Martin Scorcese is too widely respected for critics to attack directly, but his fame also makes him vulnerable to sniping and carping. Is Bringing Out the Dead really just a remake of his acknowledged masterpiece, Taxi Driver, with a more upbeat ending? Is Nicholas Cage a diluted version of DeNiro? Is this film as good as Raging Bull, or is it too long, too repetitious, and too safe?
  In this adaptation of Joe Connelly's 1998 novel, Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) is a night shift paramedic stretched past his breaking point. Like Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver (both films were written by Paul Schrader), Pierce explores the purgatory of New York City late at night, and what he experiences is sometimes real and sometimes hallucinatory: "I'd always had nightmares, but now the ghosts didn't wait for me to sleep." While the real horrors are part of his job—heart-attacks, gunshot wounds, drug overdoses, and a man skewered by a metal post—it is his job that has produced the mental horrors, especially his recurring vision of Rose, a girl who died despite his help.
  Each night Frank goes out with a different co-driver, and each one is, in his own way, as crazy as Frank. Larry (John Goodman) wants to slack off, go for some food, or ignore the messier calls. Marcus (Ving Rhames) sees only the humor and the religious possibilities while he flirts with the dispatcher; he uses one resuscitation to stage a fake resurrection. Tom (Tom Sizemore) is waiting for a chance to do some damage, and after first beating on a patient with a baseball bat, he is last seen taking the same bat to the ambulance. Frank meets Mary (Patricia Arquette) when he takes her father to the emergency room, and each night when he comes to work he checks to see how she and her father are doing.
  All of the acting is excellent, and the visuals bring the seamy side of New York City and its inhabitants to life in a fascinating way. Bringing Out the Dead attempts to transcend the bleak pessimism of Taxi Driver to a form of grace beyond suffering, ending with Mary holding Frank as they are bathed in a redemptive white light. Whether the conclusion is effective or not, Scorcese knows how to structure a film that combines action and philosophical musings into a powerful experience with a positive message.

Dogma
Is Dogma anti-Catholic, as its critics argue, or is it, as director Kevin Smith argues, a film created by a practicing Catholic to explore some interesting theological questions in a humorous and admittedly subversive fashion. He feels that most of the evidence (sex, for example) indicates that God has a sense of humor.
  Loki and Bartleby (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) are two angels cast out of heaven into Wisconsin, and they have finally devised a way of re-entering heaven through a cathedral which is to be re-dedicated by Cardinal Glick (George Carlin). Opposing their plan is Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), who works at an abortion clinic but tithes part of her salary to the Catholic church; she is also the "Last Scion," the last direct relative of Jesus. Supposedly aiding her are Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith himself), two "prophets" who are hanging around the abortion clinic where they think they can pick up loose women. Alan Rickman appears as Metatron, an angel embodying the voice of God in a tower of flame, but then he is sprayed with a fire extinguisher. His precise British accent conveys a fussiness that seems to fit angels. Three demons take the forms of boys on roller blades with hockey sticks, and the rhythm of their skates sounds like the buzzing of flies. God appears first as an old man and then as the singer Alanis Morissette.
  On the one hand, the film is funny; on the other it asks questions that are frequently not considered in religious discussions. Metatron tries to explain what it was like to convey to the twelve-year-old Jesus the fate that God had decreed for him. Loki (Damon) is funny and charming early in the film, despite being God's sword of wrath (he led the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah); later, however, his true nature manifests itself when he exults in slaughtering a corrupt corporate board of directors and some sinful people in a bus. The film takes a lot of chances—some work and some don't—but they all took courage on the part of the director. Distribution was moved from Disney to Lion Gate Films after the corporation in the film had a golden calf in Mickey Mouse pants as its icon.
  Dogma is uneven, but there's so much going on, from jokes to serious religious questioning, that almost everyone is bound to get a chuckle or a new thought from the film, however controversial it has become.

Cradle Will Rock
Tim Robbins' third film (after Bob Roberts and Dead Man Walking) is a big, historical drama with a large canvas of characters and events. It begs questions such as, "Is the portrayal of Orson Welles accurate or a caricature?" "Is the relationship between Nelson Rockefeller and famous muralist Diego Rivera distorted through the filter of the director's politics?"and "Are the events and motivations oversimplified for mass entertainment?" Perhaps the most damning criticism is one voiced by Stanley Kauffman, who asserts that he knew the people and experienced the events, and this wasn't the way it was. On the other hand, Oliver Stone has been lavishly praised for his obviously opinionated takes on history in JFK and Nixon.
  The time is 1936, the great depression engulfs the country, and the federal government has instituted many WPA programs to provide employment, among them the Federal Theater Project to employ out-of-work writers, actors, musicians, and stage hands to create and produce live theater across America. One of the major plots is about how Orson Welles (Angus Macfayden) and his feuding producer John Houseman (Cary Ewles) try to stage the pro-union musical, The Cradle Will Rock, written by Marc Blitzstein (Hank Azaria). Framing this story is the attempt by the FTP's director, Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones), to defend the organization to the Senate's Dies Committee against charges that its plays contain communist propaganda.
  The other major plot line is Nelson Rockefeller's hiring of Diego Rivera to create a mural for Rockefeller Center. Intertwined among these plots are a number of individual stories that claim (or distract) our attention—Roger Ebert compared the film's organization to John Dos Passos's sprawling trilogy, USA, and another reviewer, more accurately, compared it to Rivera's murals—large, colorful, full of characters and images tucked in everywhere, but ultimately two-dimensional.
  While all the characters and many of the situations are oversimplified, some parts of the film work better than others. Reuben Blades, for example; is quite effective as Diego Rivera, but John Carpenter looks nothing like William Randolph Hearst, and John Cusack, as fine an actor as he is, doesn't convince us he's Nelson Rockefeller, especially in the sequence where he dances with Rivera's models to Billy Holiday's "What a Little Moonlight Can Do." Welles and Houseman are reduced nearly to stereotypes, but Emily Watson is fine as Olive Stanton, Bill Murray adds pathos to the role of washed-up ventriloquist Tommy Crickshaw, Susan Sarandon is convincing as Mussolini's one-time mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, and stage actress Cherry Jones plays an intelligent and resourceful Hallie Flanagan. John Turturo is effective as an Italian actor who rejects his family's help because of their pro-Mussolini leanings, Joan Cusack is memorable as a government informer, and Vanessa Redgrave has fun playing a fictional countess married to a wealthy industrialist.
  The film's major themes focus on the right to artistic expression at both the governmental and personal level: Can the government censor works that do not agree with its philosophies? Can Rockefeller destroy Rivera's mural because it makes fun of capitalistic positions? These are questions that reverberate today in the NEA and NEH funding disputes as well as in recent conflicts between museums and the mayor of New York.
  Despite its size, Robbins' film succeeds best in the small moments—the courage of Olive Stanton standing up to sing the first song after federal troops closed the theater, Rivera debating what rights an art patron has, and the march from the closed theater to the one where the play was staged. Unfortunately, the play itself, like most works filled with political propaganda, just isn't all that impressive, but Robbins manages to capture the emotion and tension of what is often regarded as the most exciting night in American theater. Anyone interested in art, theater, or America in the mid-thirties should find this film interesting.

American Beauty
American Beauty won three major film Oscars—best picture, best director (Sam Mendes), and best actor (Kevin Spacey)—as well as Oscars for best achievement in cinematography and best screenplay written directly for the screen. Annette Bening was also nominated for best actress, and the film received nominations for editing and original film score. Yet, it is not the average Oscar-winning film—not a Shakespeare in Love (1999), a Titanic (1998), an English Patient (1997), or a Braveheart (1996). In the opening sequences a daughter asks her boyfriend on videotape to kill her father, the father masturbates in the shower, and the father acknowledges in voice-over narration that he is dead. Was this film, like most Oscar winners, a "safe" film despite its unconventional elements? Or did an original example of film-making actually achieve the Oscar?
  First, there's no denying that the film has some elements that distract from its accomplishments. It borrows substantially from other films—the voice-over dead narrator recalls Sunset Blvd and, like the voice-over in Blade Runner, was apparently added in the editing. The clash between rebellion and conformity in the suburbs with an undercurrent of sexual perversion runs from The Graduate through Blue Velvet and other David Lynch films to recent films such as Happiness and Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (to pick fairly arbitrary points along the continuum). This mix of loveless marriage, teenaged angst, cross-generational lust, and violence is hardly new. Mendes updates it a little by making one of the rebels an aging baby-boomer, and his view of the scene is not as unrelentingly satirical as that in Happiness or as downbeat as that in The Ice Storm, although he parallels the latter's ending by substituting a drenching rainstorm.
  While many of the characters are stereotypes—the people in mid-life crises looking for sexual flings to recapture their youthful fires, the angst-ridden teenaged daughter, the sexy and apparently promiscuous cheerleader, the recovering drug-addict son, the retired Marine with repressed lusts—the acting in virtually every case is so fine as to almost transform these stereotypes into rounded characters. Perhaps that's another way of saying that almost everyone is a stereotype of some sort and that only the little touches of individuality, often humorous, lift them up into being individual characters.
  The story follows about a year in the life of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening), and their teenaged daughter Jane (Thora Birch). Lester is, by his own admission, a walking zombie, oblivious to most of what happens in his job as an advertising writer and in his personal life. Carolyn, a seller of real estate, is driving herself crazy competing against Buddy "King" Kane (Peter Gallagher). Trying to reestablish some contact with the daughter, Lester and Carolyn attend a basketball game where Jane is participating in a half-time cheerleading show, but Lester immediately becomes infatuated with Angela (Mena Suvari ), Jane's cheer-leading friend. During the routine, he conjures up the first of several fantasies in which Angela, nudity, and large quantities of American Beauty rose petals are combined in various proportions.
  On one side of the Burnhams live a gay male couple both named "Jim," and on the other side live retired Marine Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper), his totally withdrawn wife Barbara (Allison Janney), and their son Ricky (Wes Bentley). How all of these characters interact in a way that leads to the death of Lester is the crux of the story (since he tells you of his death in the opening sequence, I'm not giving anything away, and the ending, despite the death, is surprisingly upbeat).
  Kevin Spacey is superb as Lester, delivering each line of dialogue with care and emphasis; his gestures, his slow-building of muscle as he works out, his phrasing of "I rule," the expression on his face at the end, and his meditative tone in the voice-over narration all combine to create a seamless portrait of an aging man trying to recapture his lost direction through teenaged lust, his rejection of his job (his manipulation of the company into giving him a buy-out when he is about to be fired is a shining moment) and buying the car of his dreams—a red 1970 Firebird. Annette Bening also is extraordinary. Although some critics felt she was over the top, her semi-breakdown at the end of the day when she fails to sell a house struck me as terrifyingly realistic. This is a woman on the edge, constantly balancing her personal hysteria and frustration against her professional need to project and live a manicured suburban existence. Thora Birch as Jane, Mena Suvari as Angela, and Peter Gallagher as Buddy are all fine, as is Allison Janney whose performance as Barbara Fitts, dominated to where she hardly exists, is chilling. Chris Cooper is outstanding as Col. Fitts in that he is given the most stereotypical part—a harsh, controlling, repressed, violent ex-Marine—and he manages to make us sympathize with the man's pain and confusion even though we know almost nothing about him or what made him the way he is. Darkly handsome Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) is the most surprising and complex character. Driven into a mental hospital for two years by his father's beatings, he emerges with a belief in a benign power that oversees everything and a supreme self-confidence. Constantly videotaping to remind himself of the beauty in the smallest details of ordinary life (his favorite tape is of a plastic bag dancing in a wind current), he refuses to fight back when his father strikes him but deals enough drugs to have accumulated $40,000 and a roomful of expensive audiovisual equipment. He's also in love with Jane.
  Ultimately, whether this film succeeds for an individual viewer or not will depend on the acceptance of the underlying message that beauty lies everywhere and that people must only look beyond the obvious materialistic pursuits of the suburbs to find it. Obviously, this message is not new, and many critics dismissed it as New Age wish fulfillment. The psychic erosion caused by deliberately repressed homosexuality is also contrasted with the happy lives of the two openly gay "Jims." But American Beauty is not a philosophy textbook, although at times it talks when it should just shut up and let the visuals make their point; it presents its philosophy in a dramatic context using actors who are at the top of their forms while complementing them with award winning visuals and a very effective soundtrack. Only you can decide if you think it is slick, stereotypical New Age yearnings or if it makes a valid point to become one of the best films of the year. Top