Asphalt City
You might recall a scene in “Repo Man” where Emilio Estevez, engaged in a high-speed automobile repossession, says, “This is intense,” and Harry Dean Stanton replies, laconically, “Repo man’s always intense.” Being an urban paramedic can also have that effect; you needn’t even have seen the movies to know that. Directed by Jean-Stephane Sauvaire from a screenplay by Ryan King and Ben Mac Brown (adapting Shannon Burke’s 2008 novel “Black Flies”), “Asphalt City” opens during an outer-boroughs New York City emergency medical intervention so fraught with danger it seems hard to believe though we do believe that hapless rookie Ollie (a fresh-faced but still newly haggard Tye Sheridan) is unable to fully treat a housing project shootout victim after getting shot at himself.
This is not a film that strains for fresh-sounding dialogue. Screenwriters King and Brown don’t overdo it: “I’m trying to do my job here.” “Fuing rookie.” Even: “I’m getting too old for this stuff.” They are all heard on the densely populated but multi channel soundtrack.
Sauvaire likes his life situations extreme. His overload of sound and vision served him well enough in 2018’s boxing in a Thai prison punchfest “A Prayer Before Dawn,” which had an unusually buoyant narrative structure. The story here has fewer surprises.
You go into big-city paramedicking with one goal in mind. You want to help people. But these people! They’re a nightmare! They live in squalor, they don’t speak English, they don’t brush their teeth, they won’t say thank you when you save their lives. It wears on you after a while. It doesn’t help Ollie’s own existential outlook that he’s rooming in Chinatown with a couple of ancients while he studies for the MCAT to save money for med school, or that he’s locked into an intense and arguably unhealthy sexual relationship with a single mom who doesn’t know how to talk to him.
Potentially unaware that it’s doing this, but still, what a white male bigot from the city might take away from this movie is all in its first half hour of emergency sequences. Namely that every racial or ethnic group he fears is one he should fear. Black kids on PCP with guns! Fat barechested tattooed Puerto Ricans torching pit bulls not the ones they’re always telling you are safe to adopt! Junk-sick maybe Filipino women hawking phlegm through the back of an ambulance for ten straight minutes! It really IS a jungle out there! Holy shit!
Ollie can’t keep his head above water, but his good shift partner, the older, grizzled Rutovsky “Rut” for short seems to have things relatively figured out, at least initially. Played with admirable restraint by Sean Penn (who also wears a bandanna and do-rag like nobody’s business), Rut isn’t a total cynic after decades on the force: He knows the moves, and has a keen sense of pragmatism that leads him into very dark moral waters as the film goes on. (Rut has an estranged partner played by Katherine Waterson, whose Expression of Disapproval reveals her as Sam’s true chip off the old block.) Michael Pitt beefs himself up and puffs himself out and comes on like he wants to be in “The Boondock Saints 3: This Time It’s Personal” as bad shift partner Lafontaine; Lafontaine has most of the worst lines in the movie (“I don’t know if I believe in Heaven but I believe in Hell,” hooboy; “I ain’t Jesus, I’ll tell you that,” etc.). But Mike Tyson is so believable as Ollie’s gruff station chief that “stunt casting” barely gets a chance to form in one’s mind before it completely dissipates.
Paradoxically, the film is at its most persuasive when it’s at its quietest. A grim scene in which Ollie and Rut go to a nursing home and find a patient with his lungs filling with fluid, knowing that the trip to the hospital will result only in an immediate bounceback to the substandard care facility, knowing they’re just enacting a pantomime this scene is uncomfortable and powerful. Also quite memorable is a scene in which Penn’s character turns to Sheridan’s and says, “Have you ever heard of ‘the old normal’?” But then: black flies swarming around apartment of a murdered girl (the movie’s original title was that of the novel), or a childbirth tableau so blood-soaked it makes the finale of “Immaculate” look like the lobby of George V. Sometimes maxing out doesn’t yield optimal results.
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