Minor Martin Scorsese, but in view of recent performance, minor is an improvement. Major Scorsese (Kundun, Casino, The Age of Innocence) is pretentious Scorsese, puffed-up Scorsese, inflated Scorsese. This one, an anti-valentine to New York City in the pre-Giuliani years of the decade, is an unmistakable companion piece to his Taxi Driver, complete with slow-motion pedestrians and clouds of steam (along with some trendier fast-motion as well), complete with ruminative first-person narration penned by Paul Schrader (working from a novel by Joe Connelly), and complete with population of human vermin, human litter, human detritus. (It is a companion piece, too, to any number of other Scorseses in its connoisseur's rock-and-roll songtrack.) But this is a paler Taxi Driver, quite literally so in the desaturated color photography of Robert Richardson: hard to tell whether Scorsese's "vision" has changed (from the overheated Expressionism of a quarter-century ago) or whether he has simply put on some fashionable new eyewear. Equally paler is the protagonist, an anemic ambulance driver instead of choleric cab driver, a do-gooding paramedic haunted by the ghosts of lost patients, and particularly (for no discernible reason) the ghost of one by the name of Rosa. The narrative is formlessly episodic, with variety provided by a different ambulance partner on each of the three days covered (Scorsese himself provides the voice of the unseen radio dispatcher); and the grim realities, leaving aside the ghostly apparitions, pile up very fast to the dimensions of a nightmare. Or in other words, to the dimensions of unreality. Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore, Cliff Curtis. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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