Surprisingly enough, a check of Rotten Tomatoes shows very mixed reviews of this film. Well, go figure. The world is full of cretins. Philistines.

As usual, I've been thinking a lot about creativity recently, especially because of reading biographical material about Ezra Pound and trying to understand what sort of person he was. And one thing I know, and have long known, is that you cannot do what Scorsese has done here. As an artist matures, he learns to produce more mature works, masterpieces. But there is a sort of wild, energetic work that an artist is able to produce while he is young and not yet in real control of his creativity (and here by ``artist'' I intend to include, for instance, mathematicians) that, in some respects, he will never be able to equal again for the rest of his artistic life.

And yet with this film Scorsese, a mature artist, has produced a work of art with the same sort of wild energy that was in the films at the beginning of his career such as Mean Streets and, most especially, Taxi Driver. This is just not believable. Scorsese is simply too old to be able to generate this kind of energy. And yet he's done it.

Okay, let me come at this from a different angle. It's a question of what art is and does. Art can be all sorts of different things --- serve all sorts of different purposes. But one kind of art was described by a visiting writer a few years ago who taught a one-day seminar on writing here at the University of Hawaii and who said, ``A short story is an urgent message.''

Lots of wonderful pieces of literature and art are not urgent messages. For my part, I wish that I could say that the stories I've written are urgent messages, but I think that probably only ``The Chekhovian Smile,'' written in 1982 qualifies. But the fiction and movies I value the most highly are urgent messages. Taxi Driver was an urgent message. Bringing Out the Dead is an urgent message.

Taxi Driver came about because Paul Schrader had lived on the streets of New York almost as a homeless person for many months. He wrote a screenplay based on the New York he had learned to know during that time and also modeled in large part on Dostoievsky's Notes from Underground. He showed it to his friend, Robert De Niro. De Niro and Scorcese had been old friends, and De Niro had discovered his ``voice'' as an actor (as it were) by starring in Scorcese's film Mean Streets (1973). (He already had various minor screen credits at that point.) But almost nobody saw Mean Streets when it came out, so De Niro was still an unknown. (He was still an unknown when Coppola cast him as the young Don Corleone in The Godfather Part II in 1974). Anyway, De Niro kept bugging Scorsese about Paul Schrader's script and Scorsese decided to make it.

I vividly remember seeing Taxi Driver with my wife in Lawrence, KS when it came out. We walked out of the theatre dazed. There had never been a film like that and we had no idea what to make of it. The ending (where De Niro's character wakes up in a hospital, still alive, and finds the world treating him as a hero) was so bizarrely shocking that nobody could think about much of anything else.

If I'd known then what I know now about movies, I would have immediately gone back and seen Taxi Driver two more times. It takes that many to absorb it all. Because the impact of the film is not just the story line and the acting. A capsule review of the film might say, in part, ``This movie shows us the seamy side of life in the Times Square area of New York.'' But the impact of the film does not come simply from the locations where it was shot. The impact comes from the way it was shot, the way Scorsese's camera work immerses you in the scenes he is shooting, so that you see, hear and feel what it's like to be on those streets.

Some critics are sometimes annoyed by Scorsese's camera dexterity, finding it overly slick. And it's true that Scorsese sometimes overdoes it and uses weird shots in a way that calls attention to the shooting and distracts from the story content. But Scorsese understands what Hitchcock understood and what many other good directors don't seem to understand: the way that the camera is an eye. I don't know much about the theory of perception, but I do know that your eye (or my eye, at any rate) is constantly moving, changing its focus. It can take in a whole landscape at one moment and at the next moment zero in on the fingers of someone's hand crushing a cigarette.

In Woody Allen, for instance, or Coppola, the camera is not an eye. In Renoir, the camera is definitely not an eye. In Renoir, the camera looks at the movie in somewhat the same way that one looks at a play on stage when one is sitting in the audience; except that even while watching a play on stage, one's eye changes its focus more often than Renoir's camera does.

Kubrick shows you a movie from an external, detached point of view. Orson Welles shows it to you in a way that makes you always aware of the space --- a massive space, in Welles's films --- that the characters inhabit.

Scorsese's camera takes you right into the middle of the film. Sometimes what you are seeing is what one of the characters in the film is seeing. But then in After Hours, there's a scene in which Roseanna Arquette drops a set of keys out of her window down to Griffin Dunne on the sidewalk outside, and for a moment, in a shot that lasts only seconds but which took almost a whole day to get right, the camera shows us the point of view of the keys falling toward the sidewalk.

What Scorsese does is more than just moving the camera a whole lot. You have to move the camera in a way that corresponds to the things that the eye is paying attention to. You have to think about the question: When someone arrives in Times Square for the first time, where will this person look and what is the sequence in which the eye will focus in on different things?

You have to present a vision in such a way that even someone who knows Times Square well will be seeing it as if for the first time.

Taxi Driver opens showing De Niro's taxi cab cruising the streets near Times Square. Scorsese's camera work grabs you by the throat and plunges you right into the middle of the New York streets before you ever see De Niro. And De Niro, when you first see him, looks like a fairly ordinary young guy. (The mohawk haircut doesn't come till later in the movie.) But you get De Niro's voice-over, reminiscent of a Jack Kerouac monologue, which pervades the film. Voice-overs can often be an incompetent director's substitute for good story telling, and some people have criticized the voice-over in Taxi Driver, but De Niro's voice-over put you right in the middle of his horrible world just as Scorsese's images did.

You could take De Niro's voice-over, maybe extend it a bit, add in the rest of the sound track, and have a compelling radio play to be listened to in the dark. Or you could take the visual part of the film without the sound and have a silent movie that would still mesmerize people.

The music in Taxi Driver was a jazzy, bluesy score by Bernard Hermann which fit in perfectly with the grim, desperate New York Streets.

Now, in Bringing Out the Dead, Scorsese grabs you by the throat from the very opening moments in exactly the same way, visually and with the voice-over and with the music. Scorsese's use of classic rock was innovative in Mean Streets. Now, though, everybody uses rock for their soundtracks and it no longer has the power to take you by surprise. But in this film, Scorsese has managed to find rock music with unexpected power, that grabs you by the throat from the very first scene.

As with camera work, Scorsese understands that music is not just background. It used to be a truism among film composers that, ``If you're aware of the music in a movie, then the music has not succeeded in fulfilling its function.'' This has never been Scorsese's attitude. The music in his films is another way in which the meaning of the film is communicated. Like the camera work, the music plunges you into the middle of the film; it shows you what the characters in the film are feeling. The music in Bringing Out the Dead attacks you emotionally in the same way that the streets of New York attack the characters in the film emotionally.

Instead of a taxi cab we have an ambulance. And instead of De Niro we have Nicholas Cage. Some people (not me!) get annoyed by Nicholas Cage and find his performances overly mannered. Here, though, it is as if this film had been written for him in the same way that Taxi Driver seemed written for De Niro. Cage's familiar look of wide-eyed bewilderment when faced with scenes of horror is one of the crucial elements of the film.

And instead of Times Square, we now have, more than anything else, as well as the streets of New York, the horrible chaos of overcrowded hospital emergency rooms. Dying patients brought into a place where there is no remaining space to put them, nobody free to treat them. Crazy patients who are fighting with the doctors and nurses.

Me, I don't like blood and gore. If all I'd known about this movie was where it was set and what the story was, I would definitely have given it a miss.

But you have to see this film. It shows you in an extremely powerful way what life is all about on the most elemental level: we all have to eat, we have to breathe, we have to keep our body fluids confined within the envelope of skin, we have to communicate with each other in a way that makes some minimal amount of sense. During the greatest part of our lives, we manage all this so well that we can just forget about it. But go into a hospital emergency room with blood pouring out of your side and with the nurses screaming at the patients and screaming at the attendants wheeling you in that they have no room for you and nobody with time to treat you, and you're reminded of the basic reality of life that underlies all the other games we play.

Go see it. But don't go with the expectation of being entertained for an hour by a movie you can forget immediately afterwards.

Go to be blown away.

--Lee Lady