Asphalt City

The stressful, despairing but compelling paramedic drama Asphalt City is bound to be compared to 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead, Martin Scorsese’s hyperactive take on New York City EMTs. But the more relevant likeness, I think, is to the cop drama Colors. In that film, Sean Penn played a hot-blooded young cop partnered with tired veteran Robert Duvall; here, Penn takes over as the tired veteran, while Tye Sheridan rides shotgun as Penn’s rookie partner. There’s a lot mentally wrong with Penn’s character, Gene “Rut” Rutkovsky, but considering it’s Penn, Rut is surprisingly even-tempered, almost gentle. That’s meant to throw us off the scent of Rut’s less admirable qualities, or perhaps the film is proposing him as an essentially decent man who succumbs to pessimism and, about two-thirds into the movie, makes an inhumane decision that he sees as merciful.

The perhaps too-symbolically-named Ollie Cross (Sheridan) is considered by some of his more hostile colleagues as a tourist in the paramedic life; he’s studying to get into med school. Ollie just wants to help people. But the craziness of the job and how much desensitization it requires, especially in a chaotic urban milieu, get inside him and start pushing him towards being a rough customer like Rut or like Lafontaine (Michael Pitt in a juicy performance), a callous EMT who drives with Ollie a few times. People’s lives are in the hands of guys whose idea of a prank is to leave a bloody dead dog in someone’s locker. But that’s kind of a nihilistic rewrite of the doctors in M*A*S*H, who cracked jokes while elbow-deep in someone’s bowels. 

In either case, you don’t want an easy weeper coming to slap the paddles on your chest; you want cold technicians who know the boilerplate reassurances (“Stay with us, buddy, you’re gonna make it”) but can flip their emotional switch and perform the tasks at hand. Surgeons don’t often have a warm bedside manner, but EMTs are expected to at least make a patient feel rescued and headed for safety; the paramedics I’ve personally seen in action have been gracious and positive. But city responders may be a different species; they see the worst at their worst, and even the best are often not their best at their worst. EMTs often arrive to screaming and blood everywhere. The director, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, working from a script by Ryan King and Ben Mac Brown, spatters the screen in grit and gore; the dominant color is red, often flashing in our faces. Sauvaire does a detailed job of creating the inferno these men live and work in. As in Taxi Driver, it’s not the job but the city that torments the characters.

Asphalt City was once called Black Flies, after the Shannon Burke novel it’s based on, and that’s a finer and more poetic title but also possibly misleading (it sounds like a horror movie about demons — which this sort of is). Black flies are treated as harbingers of death, humming thickly and maddeningly around clotting blood and cooling flesh. Penn and Sheridan deliver anguished turns as men who must co-exist with the flies, and who seem to hear them buzzing inside their skulls constantly. (How insane is their job? Their supervisor is played by Mike Tyson.) I believed in the men, not always in the women they’re involved with. Katherine Waterston has a terrific angry scene as Rut’s ex-wife; Raquel Nave doesn’t bring much to the role of Ollie’s booty call (he hesitates to call her a girlfriend). I didn’t spot any female paramedics — it’s hilarious that Madame Web of all films shows this movie up in that area. 

I wouldn’t call the film sexist, though. (As I’ve said in other contexts, the movie isn’t feminist, but it’s not remotely masculinist either.) The women sadly know they don’t fit well into these particular men’s lives. And some of the female patients come through with vivid impressions. Kali Reis, a boxer who starred in the most recent season of True Detective, pierces our hearts as a pregnant addict whose encounter with Rut leaves them both wounded. Authentic faces like Luisita Salgado and Glorimar Crespo, as loud street people, flood the screen with profanity, cracked humanity, lacerated pride. The meaning of city life as seen in this movie boils down to making other people suffer as much as you’ve suffered, and how do you deal with being surrounded by people like that if you’re sworn to help and heal? Asphalt City isn’t perfect — all the scenes between Ollie and his lover are only there to make a point about his devolution, and we’re not terribly invested in the couple. But it has something; it has its own ornery integrity, and wants to stare death and despair full in the face, as its protagonists do every night. 

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