"Making a film is, for Martin Scorsese, a happiness and a torture. For us, his audience, it is a promise that sweetens the whole year."

I couldn't agree more with the above statement, made by Michael Powell in his foreword to Mary Pat Kelly's remarkable oral history Martin Scorsese: A Journey. Yet there was something missing in the air prior to Bringing Out the Dead's theatrical bow, hype or anticipation, the feeling that its promise was indeed sweet. And when it finally came out, audiences, even movieheads, reacted with indifference. I've used the word "zeitgeist" often lately, but I must employ it again here, because there's no other way to explain how such an entrancing vision--and a star vehicle, when all's said and done--entered and exited cinemas like a lamb than to say that the zeitgeist still doesn't and may never fully receive Scorsese. He's too damn mythical for the masses.

Despite its rock 'n' roll posturing, Bringing Out the Dead has a core gentility that is beguiling and very Buddhist--it now looks as though Scorsese's career will be divided into pre- and post-Kundun, the storm and the calm. His movies have paralleled the scriptures from the start; in Kundun, the story of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, he finally made a picture that is spirituality, a pacific consolidation of his cinematic and theological obsessions, the sum of which is a nearly indescribable phantasmagoria of transcendent beauty. Both films, Bringing Out the Dead and Kundun, are about men who've been entrusted with the lives of many and how they cope with that responsibility. The protagonist of each picture is tormented by images of those he could not save; when paramedic Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) invokes the term "grief mop" while conveying his occupation in voiceover, we recall the tableau of a helpless Kundun surveying his slain countrymen.

In the opening moments of Bringing Out the Dead, which takes place in early-'90s New York, Frank has unwillingly embarked on a three-day misery bender, a weekend shift that ominously coincides with a full moon. His Friday partner (John Goodman) thinks only of how to fill his stomach; his evangelical Saturday partner (Ving Rhames) overzealously rises to every challenge; and his Sunday partner, Tom (Tom Sizemore), is an infamously pent-up troublemaker. The last time we see Tom, he's beating his own ambulance van to smithereens in a hospital parking lot. These coworkers are too egocentric to hear Frank's cries for connection--an undeniable motif. In Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the shallow cabbie Wizard advises simmering vigilante Travis Bickle: "Don't worry about it." Contrary to a critical crutch, however, Bringing out the Dead is not "Ambulance Driver". In simplest terms, Taxi Driver is about exploding while this film is about imploding. Bickle wants to rescue a teenage runaway where Frank wants to resurrect one; unlike Bickle, Frank recognizes the fallacy of his crusade.

Frank turns to Mary (Patricia Arquette), the daughter of a man he recently revived, for salvation, but does so by offering it to her. (Force of habit.) Mary's father remains barely alive at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy, and because they haven't spoken in three years, she is beside herself with regret. Frank's impulse to assume responsibility for Mary's well-being results in a pair of backwardly uplifting scenes at a druglord's apartment, the second of them containing Scorsese's patented moment of cinematic innovation--in this case, an achingly beautiful view of the downtown skyline lit by unlikely fireworks. Also worth noting is one of Scorsese's few explicitly religious odes in a closing shot of these would-be saviors that echoes Michaelango's Virgin Mary sculpture "Pietà" (English translation: Mercy).

Arquette does a better job of animating Mary than I had given her credit for upon first viewing. It's a sensitive performance best watched through Cage's vulnerable gaze. Wearing zombie make-up that does become a trifle ludicrous, Cage, meanwhile, achieves a Zen stillness that draws us towards him regardless, and his spastic outbursts finally feel organic to a character again here instead of seeming like a post- Oscar/Bruckheimer attempt to reassure himself that he's still a wild and crazy guy. Adapting Bringing out the Dead from Joe Connelly's debut novel, Scorsese's longtime henchman Paul Schrader (screenwriter of Taxi Driver) said during a symposium at last year's Toronto International Film Festival that the casting of Cage won the director not only a fearless leading man, but also fewer interferences from the studio. It's uncomprised and uncomprising, then, and while Joe Public may have opted not to collect on its promise, Bringing out the Dead absolutely sweetened last year.

Watching Scorsese's latest on DVD exquisitely simulates the theatrical presentation. The 2.35:1 letterboxed, 16x9-enhanced video is crisp and perfectly saturated (reds, integral to the film's design, remain stable throughout). Blacks and ghostly whites--DP Robert Richardson's signature lighting effect--have astonishing range and depth; though compression artifacts are non-existent, some might mistake the preponderance of grain (there to accent the gritty city) for break-up.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 track (a Dolby Surround version is also included) is subtly atmospheric, with diegetically accurate use of the surrounds and LFE channel. One may expect the big car accident, for instance, to have major bass, but it doesn't really resonate and probably wouldn't in real life. It's a shame that Scorsese chose not to provide a commentary track, as his Criterion monologues are among that outfit's best, though he briefly appears alongside talking heads Cage, Rhames, et al in the disc's strictly promotional 10-minute featurette. (Two theatrical trailers round out the package.) Even if it's sparsely supplemented, Bringing Out the Dead makes a fine addition to anyone's video library.-Bill Chambers