Asphalt City

Grade: C+

Asphalt City has drawn inevitable comparisons to my beloved Bringing Out the Dead – Martin Scorcese’s 1999 film that starred Nicolas Cage as a paramedic riding through the mean streets of New York City on the overnight shifts. Cage was on the short list of actors considered for Asphalt City, but that would have been like doing the same movie again. The role went to Sean Penn, and it’s his best performance of the last 15 years.

He plays the old veteran who shows a young up-and-comer the ropes. Tye Sheridan (The Tender Bar, The Card Counter) stars as Ollie, new to the department. To save money for med school, the place where he stays isn’t one of the nicer ones in Chinatown. A single mother serves as a roomie with benefits. She’s a mysteriously underdeveloped character who shows up in the film to be his nightly trash receptacle for sex.

He rides shotgun under the wing of Rutovsky (Rut for short), played by Penn in one of his more understated, grounded performances. He has received some of those same adjectives of praise for the upcoming Daddio, out in June. It’s a two-hander with Dakota Johnson. He’s a sensitive empathetic NYC cab driver, and she’s his passenger one night. His roles in Daddio and Asphalt City seem to be cut from similar cloth. Older Penn, settling down. On the other side of the spectrum is Michael Pitt as the loose cannon bad-boy shift partner. It’s basically Tom Sizemore’s character from Bringing Out the Dead. Sam Waterston’s daughter Katherine Waterston has a couple nice scenes (she has her dad’s eyebrows and eyes, too). And as the station chief, Mike Tyson may feel like a random casting choice, but he shows he can be a fine actor. He is convincing in his few scenes.

The film is very dreary and intense, and lives in that tone. A fellow critic hit the nail on the head when he noted that “it thinks it’s so cool.” Another reviewer, touching on the gore, mentioned a scene involving a newborn baby, and how it makes a similar part in Immaculate play like a walk in the park in comparison. I dunno. I actually thought the baby scene in Immaculate was more difficult to watch, but this is a bit like discussing whether you’d rather drink bear urine or deer urine.

For a long time, the movie episodically hops from one patient to the next, without much of a story otherwise. 100% of the people we see on these calls are poor non-whites, always on drugs and/or packing. In the last 40 minutes, we do get a plot and arc that is quite compelling, however little and late it is. And then director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire has no idea when he wants to end it, serving us epilogue after epilogue after epilogue. What has made Bringing Out the Dead stand the test of time for me – with annual viewings for the last 25 years – is how multifaceted it is. It’s not just a grisly ambulance/hospital movie. It’s beautiful to look at, performances are stellar, the soundtrack is one of the best ever, and for not being billed as a comedy, there’s a lot of funny stuff in it. Bringing Out the Dead is a fresh, piping hot, diverse, sumptuous Thanksgiving meal. Asphalt City is the leftover green beans.

Grade: C+