At the Turn of the Millennium, Bringing Out the Dead and Three Kings Tried to Make Sense of the ’90s

The line on the epochal movies of 1999 is that many of them shared a thrum of pre-millennial anxiety. This is true – though younger viewers might well now look askance at how movies like American Beauty and Fight Club and Office Space at least partially spoke to and about an audience of quietly aggrieved white men, toiling in relatively stable and well-paying cubicle jobs, suffocating in their middle-class picture of success. There is more to all of those movies than that glib description, of course – even American Beauty – but 25 years later, two of the season’s most powerful titles, both released in that October, spent the waning days of ’99 looking back, to more intense labors in the earlier years of the decade. Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead is set in an unspecified time in early-’90s New York City – if you want to use the admittedly non-diegetic needle drops as a guidepost, you could say it’s 1994 or thereabouts, though it feels pre-Giuliani, or closer to 1992 – while David O. Russell’s Three Kings is set specifically at the end of the first Gulf War, placing it in 1991. At one point, the Rodney King video plays on a television set.

Though their approaches are wildly different, Bringing Out the Dead and Three Kings both follow characters in positions that might traditionally be described as noble or heroic, clocking into what they’re very much aware are jobs, held by fallible people. Bringing Out the Dead’s Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) is an EMT, and he doesn’t take his duties lightly, yet its toll does inevitably turn into a kind of soul-sick mixture of guilt and selfishness, as he frets about not having personally, directly saved anyone’s life in months. In his narration, he admits that life-saving supplies an inimitable high; conversely, he’s haunted by the death of Rose, a teenager who died on his watch. Frank isn’t even sure whether saving lives is his actual job; he thinks of himself as more of a “grief mop,” there to witness others’ pain. At least Frank has the grinding urgency of constant ambulance calls coming over the wire; the soldiers of Three Kings are sitting around in limbo, longing for action as the movie kicks off. (First line: “Are we shooting?”)

A small group of soldiers does wind up getting some action when they stumble upon a map that seems to pinpoint the location of plundered Kuwaiti gold; Major Archie Gates (George Clooney), Sgt. Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), Sgt. Chief Elgin (Ice Cube), and Pvt. Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze) sneak off to steal it for themselves, with micro-flashbacks to their civilian lives (as an office worker splattered with printer ink; a disgruntled baggage handler; a guy target-shooting stuffed animals in his backyard, forced to admit he doesn’t really have a proper career) highlighting just how much they could use the extra cash, matching a Bush I folly with the recession back home. The rest of the movie is about the soldiers working their way back to the point where they feel the moral obligation to assist Iraqi rebels who the military is abandoning by declaring victory.

Russell affects greater cynicism than Scorsese, as well as greater sentimentality; for all of his movie’s irreverence, it has a touching belief that these guys can and will do some version of the right thing – that they will turn their work back into a greater calling. Frank, meanwhile, needs some form of respite from that calling, and his various partners over the movie’s three-night shift – John Goodman as a food-focused clock-puncher; Ving Rhames as a gung-ho religious believer; Tom Sizemore as a violently deranged quasi-disciplinarian – illustrate an array of mostly-ineffective coping skills. But Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader do seem to believe that some combination of rest and redemption is possible for their tortured hero.

Are these movies set around the time that George H.W. Bush left office depicting a dawning Clintonian optimism when the pressure on their heroes ultimately relents? Not precisely. If anything, as documents of 1999, they record how strange and distorted recent history can look as it helps to malform our present. Three Kings does some of its retrospective work by casting of up-and-coming movie stars who double as other cultural figures from the decade then about to end: recent ER fixture Clooney, two stars who gained fame as rappers, and a less recognizable guy more famous for directing music video touchstones. Speaking of music videos: That’s not exactly Russell or Scorsese’s background, but they do filter the ’90s through ultra-vivid, heightened visual experiences. Scorsese’s film, shot by the great Robert Richardson, is a high-contrast shock to the system, with sirens, traffic lights, headlights, and, at one point, a blowtorch, all shining ghostly halos on and around the characters. The whites of Three Kings are similarly blown out, but they come courtesy of the desert sunlight and a bleachy effect from DP Newton Thomas Sigel, rendering certain details, like an impossibly yellow-glowing plastic Bart Simpson doll grinning from the front of a military jeep, indelible. There are also famous shots illustrating what bullets can do to a human body, a more analog-looking version of the digital trickery David Fincher would employ with Fight Club. Again, the movie syncs up surprisingly well with Bringing Out the Dead, which doesn’t investigate the literal guts of Frank’s many unlucky patients, but gets plenty of mileage from the simultaneous fragility and resilience of the human body.

This is pretty far removed from the digital world of The Matrix (or maybe not, given how much that movie’s characters take pride in their real, human, non-simulation bodies). At the time, films like Fight Club or American Beauty may have felt more current to the late-1999 moment (and indeed, Fight Club in particular would echo into the new millennium, albeit perhaps not in the precise ways that might have been expected). Bringing Out the Dead and Three Kings, on the other hand, could have been said to be observing their own moments from a short-but-safe distance, where the worst crime rates of New York and U.S. involvement in a Gulf War were consigned to a retrospective remove, and more existential questions still lay ahead. For year-end accolades, American Beauty and The Insider felt more current, while The Cider House Rules and The Green Mile flew the flag for more old-fashioned entertainment. Three Kings was a modest hit; Bringing Out the Dead was a flop, and remains one of the lowest-grossing Scorsese movies of the past 40 years. (It was closer to the numbers for his religious pictures like Silence or Kundun than almost anything else he did in the ’90s or beyond.)

With another quarter-century of remove, though, both movies are certainly more memorable than the hit thrillers of the season like Double Jeopardy or The Bone Collector. Moreover, they feel more connected to their decade of origin than many of the more superficially contemporary members of the acclaimed ’99 class. Here is the underbelly of that American prosperity that enabled American Beauty-style ennui: the saving of lives coldly reimagined as a working-class grind.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on Twitter under the handle @rockmarooned.