Bringing Out The Dead, a Scorsese flick thats genuinely underrated?

Back in Spain, while we were living in Las Barreras, a little place just outside Orgiva, we had a couple of neighbors called Maggie and Isha. Both were ex social workers who had been living in Glasgow (I think) for years, had enough of the lifestyle there, and moved away to sunny Spain. Luckily for me, they were both film buffs and bought with them a great collection of dvds, which, soon after we had become friends, I started to make my way through. I eventually came across a film with a picture of Nicholas Cage looking like he hadn't slept for weeks on the front called 'Bringing Out The Dead', and I dont know why but for some reason it caught my eye.

Maybe it was the fact it said 'A Martin Scorsese Picture' on the front, by this point I'd watched Goodfellas and Casino and knew he had made them (is it bad that I'm 11 or 12 at this point?), so I presumed that this would be of the same ilk. Possibly its because it had John 'I can get you a toe' Goodman on the back, a personal favourite ever since Raising Arizona and the Big Lebowski. I don’t know. The point is I took it home and watched it. And despite not understanding quite a few of the darker plot elements, I loved it and it stuck with me for years, despite, or perhaps because I didn’t have a chance to rewatch it till years after (literally weeks ago). Its a brilliantly dark comedy, like so many of Scorseses better pictures, following a depressed paramedic over the course of three nights, with three different partners, as he desperately tries to quit despite his supervisor literally refusing to allow this, and maybe save his first patient in months.

What is it with me and tripped out, weird as shit films? This proves that before I'd ever even taken anything intoxicating, apart from maybe excess Calpol and stealing booze at the Dragon fest, I still held a fascination, or maybe appreciation is more suitable, of things surreal, dreamy and strange. Made by the same writer/director team who bought us Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, it should come as no surprise that its brilliantly observed, harrowingly bleak, and at times painfully true to life and all its absurdities.

I think that’s one of the reasons why I loved it. I had gone to a few parties down site with parents and mates and simply by living in Orgiva I had met my fair share of lost its, so some of the crazy characters I was seeing in the film didn’t seem alien, if anything they seemed familiar in some way or another. So maybe now that renders my opinion invalid, as I'm apparently biased due to nostalgia, but I don’t think so. If anything it proves that Schrader and Scorsese have traveled a few different walks of life, or at the very least observed and studied them, managed to find humanity everywhere, and the importance of humor, especially the dark kind.

And its thanks to this wisdom that I can easily overlook the films shortcomings, of which there aren't many but certainly a few: editing is a bit nasty in places, the supporting cast often run the risk of bettering the leads and I'm pretty sure Nick Cage is actually fucked up on all kinds of downers as opposed to just acting like he's going through a bad patch. But like I said, taken as a whole its a great observation on people, especially the crazy characters who come out at night, and a funny, fascinating study on feeling shitty.