(IMAGE: Aura Entertainment)
Aura Entertainment. 2024. Action Comedy. 100 minutes.
RATING: 4 out of 4
There are certain rooms on what’s left of the backlots of Hollywood where people with proximity to the metaphoric “greenlight” that gets a picture funded wax nostalgic about “character-driven cinema,” by which they mean movies where the stakes are life-sized, and where recognizable human beings grapple with problems that show up in the audience’s everyday experience. No blasters, no multiverses, no thrusters, reality does not rise or fall, end or begin again based on some cosmic MacGuffin (runes, stones, launch codes, Elder Wands, Rings of Power). People in situations provide the drama, and the difference between a situation (our general life circumstance) and a predicament (some focused and transient moment of epic external threat) is attentively defined through details originating in the world we move through as we make our way to the moviehouse.
The 1970s are thought to be a golden era for this kind of cinema, which really started to begin when Mike Nichols’ The Graduate and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde were released within four months of each other in 1967, and began to end when Darth Vader survived the final confrontation in Star Wars a decade later — a big bang that set our current universe of sequelizations and licensing deals in eternal motion. If you think of the signature films of that golden decade, they’re almost all character pieces, even when they’re genre pictures: The Godfather is the story of a son who doesn’t want to take over his father’s business, which happens to be the business of murder. The French Connection is a cop movie where the cop is a schlub who fails at almost everything he tries to do, including capturing the bad guy. Watch The Deer Hunter sometime, or Apocalypse Now. Both are visual epics. But what lingers in the mind afterward is faces: poor, doomed Christopher Walken saying “Just one shot” and then blowing his brains out as a distraught De Niro tries to force the blood back in with his hands; Marlon Brando murmuring “The horror… the horror…” while dying in pieces on the ground.
Code 3 is a movie full of those memorable kinds of faces — a black comedy/drama about paramedics anchored by a performance from Rainn Wilson that would garner instant Oscar buzz if given by DiCaprio, or even Glen Powell. Randy (Wilson) is a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown — cynical, burned out and suffering from PTSD. Except it’s not PTSD, because what traumatizes Randy — the army of ghosts he’s attended to in smashed cars and drug dens and quiet bedrooms or in kitchens or at the street scenes of robbery/homicides — isn’t “post” anything. Trauma is the life he leads, in 24 hour shifts at a time.
A lot is asked of Wilson by the assured hand of first time feature film director Christopher Leone, and by the unsparingly honest testament of paramedic turned screenwriter Patrick Pianezza, and it’s great to report that Wilson’s up to it all. He has to be funny and sometimes even wise. He has to seem like he’s about to break in two at any moment while also seeming remarkably good at his job. He has to bare his soul to strangers — the owner of an insurance company he’s trying to get a job at for one, because it shows us how desperate Randy’s becoming to awaken from the nightmare of suffering he inhabits. But Randy has to rip out his heart for us too, in direct address snatches, straight to camera, that encapsulate his particular joust with mortality through arias of despair and sarcasm that remind us of our own.
Leone and Pianezza have done a remarkable job balancing gallows humor and medical drama via tonal shifts you don’t even notice but which make the unbearable aspects of the story tolerable, and even amusing. There are a lot of laughs in Code 3, but it’s always laughter in the shadows, just a few heartbeats away from a radio call and a mad dash to some other guy’s tragedy. The sick, the dying, the injured — they’re never mocked or violated, but the twin insanities of American healthcare and American office politics are skewered without mercy. Meanwhile, ably abetted by Lil Rey Howery and Aimee Carrero as the other members of his crew, Wilson stays true, and never falls back on his comedy chops in a way that undermines Randy’s reality. Wilson gets his laughs honestly, because he knows Randy needs them as much as we do.
In a centerpiece scene, the cops arrive as Randy and his crew are trying to ease a towering African-American war veteran who is in the midst of a psychotic episode into their ambulance. The cops escalate the situation thoughtlessly, and guns are drawn. A George Floyd tragedy is in the making.
Then Howery, as ambulance driver Mike, steps between the guns and the patient, and calms the waters by saying earnestly and quietly, “I see you. I see you, and I got you.”
That’s the magic of this movie. It sees people we don’t get on our screens any more. People who suffer through difficult jobs and don’t solve that problem by saving the world but might solve it if they can just save themselves, even a little, by making it through one more day. People who go off their meds and then breakdown because American medical coverage only pays for twenty pills a month. Kids from big Hispanic families wearing bright baseball uniforms who fall to the ground in cardiac arrest because a line drive hits them square in the chest, and the anxious uncles and aunts who pray to the paramedics brought in to help because they’re the only ones available who just might keep their child alive.
It’s my favorite film of the year so far, and you’ve probably never heard of it. Because those same people on backlots who love it when a movie like this is called The Godfather or Nashville or (I mean it) Rocky are too busy flooding the zone of social media with improbable cg fantasies for the noise to let up long enough for you to know Code 3 exists.
It does. And you should see it.
Any way you can.
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