Based on Joe Connelly's memoiristic novel about his life as a paramedic in New York's Hell's Kitchen, the film follows Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage) through three nights on the job. Frank's been on a cold streak, and he's jonesing to save a life. His weekend begins with a likely candidate, a cardiac arrest named Burke whom he revives and takes to the hospital. But as he passes Burke's daughter Mary (Patricia Arquette) several times in the waiting room over the next few days, he begins to see a deeper significance in the old man hooked up to tubes and heart monitors--one that goes beyond his own personal need to save a life. Meanwhile, he drinks, deals with a new killer drug on the street, chases recidivist junkies and homeless drunks, and waits for the shot of godlike power that comes from bringing someone back from beyond.

Audiences and critics aren't likely to warm up to Scorsese's film or its characters. Despite the voice-over narration and the scrutiny of Cage's cadaverous face, Frank rarely comes across as a three-dimensional character. With his sleep-deprived, alcohol-poisoned, nerve-deadened madness, he doesn't seem to be quite human, and the viewer gradually gives up trying to identify with him. And the structure of his story, hurtling from anecdote to anecdote with breakneck speed, then halting for reveries that seem to exist outside of time or narrative, doesn't give us much to hang on to.

It's worth considering, however, that the film's failure to connect with its audience is intentional. If Scorsese and Schrader--masters of the penetrating character study, as evidenced by Raging Bull--do not present an electrifying protagonist, it's possible that they decided to work in the realm of Terrence Malick, or Schrader's own Mishima, rather than on more familiar and accessible ground. The film's repetitive framework doesn't form a plot arc so much as an impressionistic portrait.

The same can be said of the way Schrader draws the protagonist: Frank is a collection of traits, a role chock full of backstory spilling over into the present. Like a romantic composer trying to capture a single fleeting feeling, or like Van Gogh (whom Scorsese portrayed in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams) fixing onto canvas an instant of light, color, and emotion, Schrader forsakes to a large extent the linear nature of a film's unspooling. His two hours of story accumulate to form an impression, rather than a tale. And the impression can only be processed by stepping away, closing our eyes, and forming something out of the loosely gathered pieces we've been provided.

The impression left by the movie's final scene is of redemption--that much is clear from what drive Schrader and Scorsese have lent to the plot. But does Frank truly earn redemption, or is this cheap movie grace yet again?

Perhaps the answer doesn't lie in the portrait before us, but in the other works that surround it in the gallery. In Schrader and Scorsese's first collaboration, Taxi Driver, the story of Travis Bickle climaxes in horrific but essentially meaningless death. Through his indiscriminate killing and lack of response, we are supposed to feel the chilling inhumanity that has taken hold of Travis. Yet the explosion of violence has a manufactured quality, as if its bloodiness is meant to cover for Schrader and Scorsese's failure to find a reason for it.