Last night, I watched Asphalt City, a movie about paramedics in New York City starring Sean Penn as a burnt out medic with a failed family life and Tye Sheriden as the young rookie medic studying at night for his medical school entrance exams.
The movie is based on the novel Black Flies by Shannon Burke, which like the movie Apocalypse Now, is a loose retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the story of an outpost trader whose methods in the wilds of Africa, become “unsound.”
The EMS scenes are realistic, if unrelenting in their grimness. I think they hired some of my patients and bystanders from my calls to reprise their roles, the gun shot kid who codes, the crazy lady on coke, the angry crowd yelling at you while you’re trying to treat a patient, the drunk in the laundromat, the barking pit bull on too long a leash, the old tough guy dying of CHF, the abused woman with the aggressive boyfriend hovering around her, not liking the questions you’re asking, the dead body covered with flies.
The plot pivots around a medic’s nontreatment of a newborn drenched in HIV blood, just delivered by an unconscious drug addict. Penn declares the baby stillborn, but it is in fact resuscitated by a 2nd crew. Was the Penn’s call intentional or a mistake? The rookie medic has to wrestle with that question.
The movie is unrelenting in its grimness. There is too little comic relief, and the only moment of joy is a final redemption scene that involves the rookie medic entering a burning building (without a respirator) and intubating a child as fire rages all around them in a smoke filled room. (My guess is this scene was filmed after post production audiences deemed the film too bleak and the technical advisor had already been let go).
Sean Penn is excellent as the veteran medic with the tortured soul who the job has destroyed. I found him believable and, despite his action, sympathetic. If this movie got more attention, his performance might have merited Oscar attention.
“We carry the misery and nobody gives two shits about it,” he tells his young partner.
Later a second partner (a truly immoral one) tells the rookie, “When the doors of the ambulance close, we‘re not pawns anymore. We’re not even kings. We are God. We decide.”
As a sane counterpoint, the rookie’s final partner counsels “We all work in the darkness, you don’t have to let it inside you.”
By the end of the movie, what the lead characters go through, justifies the famous line from the Heart of Darkness novel, “The horror, the horror.”
The young medic says toward the finish, “You start doing this job because you want to help people, sometimes you just end up doing the complete opposite.”
For me, after 30 years, I have at times glimpsed the darkness, but never embraced it, though I know a few unlucky ones who did.
Bottom line: Worth a watch. Better alone with a tasteless TV dinner than with your spouse or date and a bowl of popcorn.
Watching you will notice an uninflated nonrebreather or two and a few other small technical goofs typical in EMS movies. There is also Mike Tyson as an EMS supervisor who takes no shit.
I liked the movie better than Bringing Out the Dead, but not as much as Broken Vessels, which I recommend if you can find it. All three fit the category of burned out paramedics do crazy shit.
It is shame that there is not a good EMS movie out there that inspires and isn’t all about burnout.
I found Asphalt City on Hulu, but it is also available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime.
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