Is this the clear­est insight into Mar­tin Scorsese’s moral perspective?

With the impend­ing release of The Irish­man and Todd Phillips’ recent Jok­er mak­ing super­fi­cial allu­sions to both Taxi Dri­ver and The King of Com­e­dy, there is renewed inter­est in the seem­ing­ly end­less debate over the extent to which Mar­tin Scors­ese endors­es his vio­lent pro­tag­o­nists. It’s an exhaust­ing sub­ject, pred­i­cat­ed on cast­ing a nar­row selec­tion of Scorsese’s vast fil­mog­ra­phy as indica­tive of all his work and adher­ing to a reduc­tive belief that depic­tion equals endorsement.

It also ignores the exis­tence of one of Scorsese’s most mov­ing films, an act of keen revi­sion­ism of his own bleak­est fea­ture, Taxi Dri­ver. Released 20 years ago, Bring­ing Out the Dead is one of Scorsese’s less­er-seen and dis­cussed works, yet it stands today as one of the clear­est insights into the filmmaker’s moral perspective.

The film con­cerns Frank Pierce (Nico­las Cage), who, like Travis Bick­le, is an insom­ni­ac work­ing grave­yard shifts on the mean streets of New York City. Yet where Bick­le scoured Man­hat­tan in a sim­mer­ing rage, wish­ing to cleanse the side­walks of the filth he saw all around him, Frank is an ambu­lance para­medic whose agony derives from his inabil­i­ty to save every­one he attempts to resus­ci­tate. Cru­cial­ly, Frank is a pas­sen­ger, forced to ride shot­gun or in the back with patients as a series of increas­ing­ly strange, antic dri­vers speed around town.

From the moment we meet Frank he is already a hag­gard mess, all sal­low skin and rac­coon eyes – a pal­lid, mut­ed blank­ness amid Robert Richardson’s sat­u­rat­ed cin­e­matog­ra­phy, which repli­cates many of the tricks of light­ing and shut­ter speed used in Oliv­er Stone’s Nat­ur­al Born Killers to com­mu­ni­cate the chron­ic over­stim­u­la­tion of a man con­stant­ly wired on caffeine.

While Bickle’s after-hours tra­vers­ing sees him fall ever deep­er into a fan­ta­sia of suprema­cist vio­lence, Frank’s night­crawl­ing stems from his fer­vent desire to save oth­ers. Not hav­ing man­aged to revive a patient in months, Frank is crack­ing under the weight of his fail­ures, and his sta­tus as a per­pet­u­al pas­sen­ger only exac­er­bates his feel­ing of help­less­ness. From the start, Scors­ese and writer Paul Schrad­er cast Frank as Bickle’s moral inverse, a man apply­ing all of his fray­ing ener­gy to the heal­ing of soci­ety, not the nihilis­tic destruc­tion of it.

Both Bring­ing Out the Dead and Taxi Dri­ver are told from their pro­tag­o­nists’ per­spec­tives, but where the scum that sur­rounds Bick­le is cast in dis­gust­ed terms, Frank con­fronts the same social rot with intense empa­thy. He man­ages to care for even the most des­per­ate patients, game­ly mak­ing a week­ly call to help a home­less drunk as a break from blood and death and reg­u­lar­ly pla­cat­ing and calm­ing a sui­ci­dal addict.

Frank’s affec­tion­ate but clear-eyed treat­ment of oth­ers in rela­tion to Bick­le is most evi­dent in their sharply diver­gent views of women. Travis, vir­ginal and embit­tered, projects onto all of the women he meets, craft­ing entire Madon­na-whore nar­ra­tives to suit his fan­tasies about them. But when Frank meets Mary (Patri­cia Arquette), whose father he saves from car­diac arrest only to doom him to a veg­e­ta­tive exis­tence, he sees her not as a tor­tured inno­cent but a fel­low lost soul, a recov­er­ing addict set adrift by the cru­el­ties of life.

Their inter­ac­tions are per­haps the only instances in the film where Frank, despite being mild­ly awk­ward around her, appears calm. Scors­ese has been crit­i­cised for a per­ceived lack of mean­ing­ful parts for women in his films, but Mary gives every impres­sion of being the pro­tag­o­nist of her own sto­ry, nev­er a func­tion of the plot or a key to Frank’s sal­va­tion despite how much of the film he spends wrestling with his guilt over her father’s sta­tus. Even when Frank col­laps­es into Mary’s arms in a pietà at the film’s close, the moment is less about her pro­vid­ing com­fort or solace than the two acknowl­edg­ing the grace of Frank’s final act of mer­cy towards her cata­ton­ic father.

Scorsese’s pro­tag­o­nists tend to be nar­cis­sists, but Frank’s zeal­ous dri­ve to help oth­ers nev­er feels like a hero com­plex. That’s true even of the film’s piv­otal scene, a hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry drug trip in which Frank spots the ghost­ly hands of all those he has failed to save reach­ing out from the ground and pulls them up from Hades. As far back as his sur­re­al stu­dent short The Big Shave, Scorsese’s work has always con­cerned men dri­ven by their nature to destroy them­selves. But Frank Pierce, alone among the wide swath of the director’s pro­tag­o­nists, is the only one dri­ven to do so to make the world a tru­ly bet­ter place.