ASPHALT CITY - Mark Reviews Movies

Asphalt City, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 28, 2024

It's not just that paramedics spend hours of their lives among the dead and dying. Asphalt City suggests a major source of turmoil for people on that strenuous but vital job is that they have spend hours of lives among other paramedics who mainly know of the dead and dying. It's a vicious cycle of misery, essentially, and one can only hope that director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's look at the lives and work of a small group of New York City paramedics is overblown to some extent. It's beyond troubling to consider that the people on the frontlines of saving lives live such an utterly bleak existence.

That is, perhaps, the central issue with Sauvaire's movie, which feels authentic—at least in regards to the specific characters it establishes for its story—but also wants to hammer home the idea that the life of a paramedic is one of continual personal crisis mixed with persistent professional strain. It sees the notion of being in proximity to death as akin to a virus.

Our protagonist, for example, found his mother dead by suicide as a kid, and his inability to provide any aid led him to pursue a medical career. Now, he has moved from small-town Colorado to New York, getting a job in the city's emergency medical services while studying for a med school exam, and it's not just that his shift begins with a gunshot victim dying. It's that nobody else on the team seems to care about that result. They've become numb to the fact of death.

All of this makes sense, and the first two acts of Ben Mac Brown and Ryan King's screenplay (adapted from the novel Black Flies by Shannon Burke) are mostly compelling as a study of the kind of emotional and psychological transference that's probably a requirement for a good number of people doing this job. Case in point, Gene Rutkovsky (Sean Penn), the main character's mentor, looks and sounds dead inside.

The man has been a full-time paramedic probably longer than Ollie Cross (Tye Sheridan), the newbie, has been alive. Only he knows what he has seen and experienced in all that time, and because of everything he has seen and experienced, Rutkovsky isn't the kind of guy to talk about such matters.

The first sections of this story simply follow these two men, on the job and, for Cross, off it. There's a real sense of momentum that Sauvaire brings to this episodic material, because the city is awash in activity, sometimes requiring EMS attention, and the little breaks the two paramedics get while on duty aren't exactly eventful for a while. Rutkovsky won't talk to his new partner about anything, and Cross is so stuck in his books and has no life beyond the job and studying for his exam (There's an occasional and neat visual motif of the flashing red lights of the ambulance bleeding into Cross' off-duty hours).

The silences are broken by calls on the radio—people who have been injured, have overdosed, have suffered a seizure or asthma attack or from some other medical condition, or just fallen asleep on the floor of a laundromat. Gradually, the two men start to bond over the shared experience, some gallows humor, and a mutual respect from knowing that they're the only two people who truly know what each one has seen on these shifts.

As a study of the pressure of the work, the movie succeeds, especially in those sequences of them doing the job and because of the lead performances. Sheridan brings a sense of earnestness and naïveté to the newcomer, who becomes overwhelmed by the exhaustion of dealing with life-or-death situations at every turn, and Penn suggests a weariness that has sunk into the very essence of Rutkovsky's being. The man has a pragmatic way of doing things (He can't answer the questions from Cross' book but almost instinctually knows exactly how to treat a patient in the moment), and if the narrative stumbles—which it certainly does—as we get to know the man, it's in how Rutkovsky's outlook subtly—and then rather decidedly, in a decision involving a baby that changes the entire course of the story—shifts toward some kind of power trip.

Everything takes a much darker tone in the build-up to the climactic scene—beyond the bloody and often hopeless nature of the job, toward how it alters or highlights the nature of these men. Rutkovsky has his moments of ego, perhaps spurred by his most recent ex-wife (played by Katherine Waterston) deciding to leave the city with the paramedic's daughter. Cross starts a pseudo-romance with a single mother (played by Raquel Nave), whose existence here boils down to the scene in which Cross shows how affected by the pain and power of the work he has become. Meanwhile, Michael C. Pitt shows up on occasion as a fellow paramedic who sees the thankless results of his efforts as an excuse to be resentful, aggressive, and violent.

It's all just a bit too much, particularly because Asphalt City is so convincing for a while as an examination of people under extreme pressure and how that seeps into the fiber of how they try to live with it. The idea is baked into the everyday nature of this story, so when the movie attempts to force it, the effort feels false.

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