Bringing Out the Cross
by H. Paul Moon

Years before Last Temptation, Martin Scorsese's opus effectively began with these words (beginning Mean Streets): "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it on the streets." Setting aside our brawls on justification by faith, this line was Scorsese's innocent but still worldly way to invite us into his personal art, of storytelling that works out Christian faith with fear and trembling.

We don't often go to the movies for that, and it's no surprise that even when we want it, the studios don't sell it. In a roundabout way -- no less pragmatic than our own journeys -- Scorsese has managed to bear witness through the most unlikely characters: playboy Johnny Boy in Mean Streets; boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull; ex-con Max Cady in Cape Fear; disciple Judas Iscariot in Last Temptation.

How is it that the consummation of this family line would be an ambulance driver? Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage), in Bringing Out the Dead, says this: "I came to realize that my work was less about saving lives than about bearing witness." Scorsese, a man who once aspired to the priesthood, has achieved that role by now. This autumn, five filmmakers generously projected Christ onto the silver screen. The pinnacle of this millennial tribute is the story of a grieving paramedic. The Messenger may have been more direct (as were the three other films later discussed), but the message (the cross) found its way best on the mean streets of pre-Giuliani New York, whizzing through the underworld in an ambulance.

Bringing Out the Dead is magic cinema, the best American movie since Nixon. (Indeed, Scorsese borrowed cinematographer Robert Richardson from Oliver Stone, an important departure from the more operatic style of Scorsese's other, Michael Ballhaus.) Ever since The Age of Innocence, a wildly underrated film, Scorsese has mastered an intuitive sense of moving camera (the camera goes where our eyes would go in our most sensual moments).

The art is, however, a means to an end. That is what makes the glut of critical response so laughable. Most of the cultural elite have desperately avoided the religiosity of this film -- or, more likely, have failed to find resonance in their own lives. To the Christian, both practicing and recovering, Bringing Out the Dead is all Gospel. (And anyway, the movie posters were not at all subtle: behind Cage's grim mug loomed a big red cross -- get it?)

The core of the movie is this repeating credo: "Sometimes you have to keep the body going, so that the brain and heart have time to heal themselves." As simple as that, the idea swept me over like a new Epiphany. Christians spend life as if the drama is here on Earth, then the epilogue in Heaven.

There is a scene in the movie where Frank goes crazier than ever and floors his ambulance, lusting after speed, loathing real pace -- he can't explain why, but he has to keep moving. He is desperate for an answer, but it hasn't arrived. Weakly, he turns to narcotics as an alternative to waiting out his salvation. That fails. He watches his three paramedic partners use overeating, cheap charismatic faith, and vengeance to fulfill themselves, but he is rightly disgusted by it all. Finally, a girl who keeps haunting him (he couldn't save her) delivers a message: "You're the one who chose to suffer." (I cherish the scene, set to These Are Days, of Frank and Mary awkwardly brushing shoulders in the back of the ambulance -- it ranks with the greatest romantic moments in cinema, like the Munchausen Waltz, or Cage's eloquent serenade in Moonstruck.) As much a love story as it is a Christian odyssey (and what is the difference?), Bringing Out the Dead reminds us of the work already done: in fact, the suffering is through, and we are left here to heal and prepare for our wedding. It is liberating (not morally, but spiritually) to realize that, after Calvary, the Great Commission became our greater personal struggle -- not psychology or moralism, but "bearing witness," or bringing out the dead to buy time for the brain and heart to heal.

For all this virtue (or, right on cue), Scorsese's film didn't fare well as a commercial product, whereas four other films attracted larger numbers: Rupert Wainwright's Stigmata, a lot of visual fun, but, that aside, just an episode of The X-Files with a little "Kumbaya, my Lord" to score; End of Days, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Jericho, a down-and-out cop -- we have never heard an incarnation of Christ speak with such a thick Austrian accent; Kevin Smith's Dogma, scrawled when he was 23 years old -- he may have written it from the back row of Intro to Western Civilization (things would have gone better had he paid attention to the lecture); and Luc Besson's action picture The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, which is Braveheart with more clothes on and no face paint.

Our last autumn shed its leaves but bore good fruit, in one masterpiece by one Martin Scorsese. Four related stabs may have even failed to draw blood, but what all these films have in common is a historically snubbed subject. The resurgence of Christ in cinema is cause for celebration by all, and actually one out of five is a victory to be shared among these talents -- great, intermediate, and (sorry, Kev) disabled. A great trend is set upon the screen now, but let us pray to be spared of another disco Jesus from the creative progeny of Andrew Lloyd Webber.