TAXI
DRIVER
Directed by:
MARTIN SCORSESE, Written by: PAUL SCHRADER, Starring:
ROBERT DENIRO, JODIE FOSTER, HARVEY KEITEL, CYBILL SHEPHERD
Released:
I976
The
very first narrative film was Thomas Edison and Edwin
Porter's
The Great Train Robbery of I903. It's
story of a train robbery in the west was filmed in the
wilds of New Jersey. Bringing the Western back east had
already been done before, but Martin Scorsese did it better
than anyone else, his
Taxi Driver is homage to
John Ford’s
The Searchers.
Both films have
the same template, but
Taxi Driver,
by
being more edgy and contemporary and postmodernly messy,
speaks directly to modern sensibilities.
Travis
Bickle (Robert DeNiro), the taxi driver of the title is the
drifting cowboy; he seems to have no past, no place and no
future that he can figure out. The only thing we know about
him is he’s a ex-Marine veteran and comes from the
back-country somewhere, if his name means anything. He
wears cowboy boots. Scorsese’s put the classic American
movie frontiersman into New York City, given him a taxi
instead of a horse, thrown in sub-rosa hints of
native-american lore and made him even more alienated from
society.
By the time
of
Taxi Driver, American life
had entered a new phase. Films like
In Cold Blood (I969)
obsessively followed two robbers modeled on real life, who
kill a Kansas farm family for forty dollars. Lone gunmen
had assassinated many political leaders startling with the
President in I963, and they entered the popular imagination
as the obsessed, often mentally ill, man from the streets
who kills a major figure in the culture for apparently no
good reason, but always a reason that fits – to him.
As
the film opens Travis applies for the taxi driver job so he
can work at night, because he can’t sleep. He’s got no
friends, except the other taxi drivers. When he complains
about his violent obsessive thoughts, he gets meaningless
advice or total incomprehension. The movie is operating on
more levels than a parking garage. Every scene is a
commentary on some facet of American life. There's lots of
fashionable statements on sex equated with guns, the cult
of the individual, and most tellingly, the cult of
innocence that must be rescued from filth.
Travis's
life changes the day he spots Betsy (Cybill Sheppard) in a
storefront campaign headquarters. Betsy, the name is a
itself is a giveaway, is made up to look like she just
stepped out of finishing school, the All-American woman
trophy prize, sitting in a store window. She returns his
stare, so he marches in on impulse and asks for a date..
Travis is on cloud nine as they talk over coffee. He makes
pungent observations about her and she responds in kind.
Travis glows in the acceptance, but a real relationship
with this upscale girl cannot succeed. He’s stirred up
emotions best left unstirred, and he has no tools to deal
with rejection. The film's preoccupations with the polluted
and the pure mean that when Travis takes Betsy to a "dirty
movie", their relationship ends.
He
runs into a twelve-year old girl on the street, Iris (Jodie
Foster) and can’t believe a girl this young is a
prostitute. (And indeed, casting the super-intelligent
Jodie Foster as a prostitute doesn’t work). He’s not shown
as religious in the film, probably because religion is
taboo subject in American films, but he’s got strong
feelings about Iris’s predicament. She becomes the idea-fix
in his mind, the girl in need of rescue, the “impure” thing
he can bring back to purity, much as the traditional
western hero does. Sport (Harvey Kietel) is her pimp. Sport
uses the standard pimp tricks of being a father figure,
lover, or provider to control her. Like the rythyms of a
Berry White song, he slow-dances her around the room,
whispering sweet things in her ear. He sometimes "sports"
an Indian headband; so that following the logic of a
western, he becomes Travis's target.
Things
start to spiral out of control when Travis buys some guns
from a street dealer. He shoots a robber in a liquor store
and runs out. He’s a vigilante protecting the righteous
from the street "filth". He locks himself in his room and
plays with his guns. He builds a slide mechanism to mount a
small handgun up his sleeve; much as a western hero has a
trick gun. One day he gives a man a ride in his taxi;
Travis recognizes him as the politician that Betsy is
working for. He later shows up at a campaign rally for the
candidate fully armed under his coat and with a Mohawk
haircut. He's confused and angry. After a surreal
conversation with a Secret Service agent, he’s forced to
run away when they try to take his picture.
The
funereal dirge echoes on the soundtrack. Travis wanted to
assassinate the candidate. Somebody has to pay for Betsy
(America) dumping him. Scorsese likes to put his
protagonist in a mental bind that terrorizes the
protagonist and us. The gruesome climax and ending of the
film is amazingly well blocked out in a dingy rooming
house. At that time, it was considered very bloody; now
even after chainsaw massacres it still stands up as a
depiction of pent-up fury unleashed, and one of the more
realistic gunfights ever filmed, taking place in a cramped
hallway. The final shot of the sequence is based on old NYC
police photographs of crime scenes; the police photographer
would place a camera near the center of the ceiling to
photograph the whole room from above, as if in an
architect's plan view.
Robert
DeNiro is one of the finest performers in film and this is
the role that made him. He inhabits the character of
Travis. It’s as if the last Mohican has arrived in New
York, but he’s played by Robert DeNiro, so Scorseses'
message that Travis is a creep get's lost. The character of
Travis is a compilation of all the mythical alienated
individuals who ride in and save the girl from the clutches
of the (impure) bad guy. The same idea of cowboy in New
York had been done differently earlier as
Midnight Cowboy (I969).
In
a case of life imitating art, President Ronald Reagan was
shot at by a mentally unstable young man who was trying to
impress Jodie Foster, apparently inspired by the film.
Scorsese then answered with
The King of Comedy, in which
DeNiro's character on a similar mission is a
laughingstock.
scenes
from the film: "You Talkin to Me?" --- Packing Heat --- Betsy the Pure --- Trailer
(a)
The producer of the film was Julia Philips. Her
autobiographical book on the 70s and 80s in Hollywood makes
interesting reading.
(b) Robert DeNiro was a star from the day the film opened.
His best films were directed by Martin Scorsese.