Bringing Out the Dead

I was roaming around the Jeffrey Overstreet review website lookingcloser.com and found a review of Bringing out the Dead. I didn't really agree with it, so I thought I'd do the film justice on here.



Bringing out the Dead is about a lot of things: the sad state of the world, the strong hold of hopelessness, redemption. But what I really latched onto when I watched the movie was the theme of saving and being saved. This isn't in the spiritual sense of the word, though I guess it could be interpreted as such. Nicolas Cage needs to save people to save himself. Without that act, the act of bringing people back to life, he is losing his. He is like his patients, each spends a moment in between the living and the dead, waiting for someone or something to push them over in either direction. Cage's Frank has just been spending more time there than the people he loses. Frank needs saving. But he can't be rescued because he can't save anyone else. When he lets a patient die, he "saves" that man from the struggle he (Frank) can't win. And death becomes salvation. While it is easy to think this is when Frank is "saved," I think he truely finds his truth and a gentle push toward hope when he lets himself fall asleep in the arms of Patricia Arquette. He is letting someone save him. That's how I think the film's ending can be interpreted in a spiritual sense - there is nothing you can do on your own to save yourself. You have to let someone else do it for you.

I also think that this works as another form of the Wizard of Oz Syndrome (WoOS). Like the cowardly lion, the scarecrow, and the tin man, Frank is after something he already has. Frank desperately wanted to save someone, and he did, just not in the way he thought he had to. He "saves" Patricia Arquette's character, Marc Anthony's character, and the drug dealer. He doesn't bring them back from the dead, he just keeps them here with the living. And if Frank really saw, actually let himself see, that he was doing what he felt he had to do, the epiphany Overstreet talks about would have happened much sooner in a different way.

Great Movie.

P.S. - Overstreet usually gets it right.

****