Taxi Driver

Happy New Year everyone! Let’s kick off the year with a month review of the two greatest powerhouses who come together and make great films. I’m talking about none other than one of the best directors, Martin Scorsese, and one of the best actors, Robert De Niro. Now bear in mind that this will be films that I have seen, since I have not seen all eight films they collaborated on. With that said, I haven’t seen “Mean Streets,” so I will instead skip to the 1976 amazing film, and one of my favorites, “Taxi Driver.”

The steam flying up around the manhole in the street is a dead giveaway. Manhattan is a thin cement lid over the entrance to Satan's home, which is also full of cracks. Hookers, hustlers, pimps, pushers, frauds, and freaks – they’re all at their peak. They form a busy, faceless, shameless society that knows a secret list. On a hot summer night that cement lid becomes an uncontrollable rant written in neon: walk, stop, go, come, drink, eat, try, enjoy. Wait a minute…enjoy? That’s not likely. Only the faceless ones who you look at as utter filth could enjoy it.

This is what Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, might write in his diary. Travis, a lonely man who comes from another place, drives a Manhattan cab at night. By day he sleeps a little, takes pills to calm himself down, drinks peach brandy, which he sometimes pours on his breakfast cereal, and goes to adult films to relax. At a certain time he is aware that his headaches are worse and he speculates that he may have stomach cancer.

Travis Bickle is the hero in “Taxi Driver.” He’s as crazy as they are, a psychotic, but played by De Niro as a fascinating character residing in a place that’s his creation as much as he is the creation of it.

Vincent Canby of the New York Times said, “Taxi Driver is in many ways a much more polished film than Mr. Scorsese's other major Manhattan movie, Mean Streets, but its polish is what ultimately makes it seem less than the sum of its parts.” The original screenplay was done by Paul Schrader, who was new at the time, and he enforces a smart plan on Travis’s story that finally makes it too simple. It steals the mystery from the film. Canby says, “At the end you may feel a bit cheated, as you do when the solution of a whodunit fails to match the grandeur of the crime.”

Until that last moment “Taxi Driver” is a vivid, electrifying portrait of a character so particular that you will be surprised that he makes constant dramatic sense. Canby comments, “Psychotics are usually too different, too unreliable, to be dramatically useful except as exotic decor.”

Travis Bickle – a character designed by the actor, writer, and director – remains one of the greatest characters ever portrayed from beginning to end, probably because he is more of a character who is crazy. He is the person who shows us our nightmares of urban isolation, treated in a performance that is effective as much for what De Niro does to this character. This kind of acting is rarely seen. This is talent, which one gets in theater, as well as from behavior, which is what movies normally give the viewers.

If De Niro was not so good of an actor, Travis would be your usually sideshow freak. The screenplay gives him plenty of time to work with the character, thankfully. Until the final moments, “Taxi Driver” has a type of hyper lack of direction that is a direct reflection of Travis’s mind, capable of eruptions of common sense and discipline that are separated when he is confused. Travis writes in his diary, “I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention,” and then sets out to make a name for him by plotting a murder of a politician.

Travis is a buildup of self-destruct instruments. He befriends a pretty, smart campaign worker, played by Cybill Shepherd (who Canby says “recoups the reputation lost in At Long Last Love”), but wonders why she is appalled when he takes her to see one of his favorite adult films. Canby describes Travis’s mind as “full of crossed wires and short circuits.”

There is a point in the film (which I will not say or else I will give away the plot) where is questionable, but the rest of the film works. The supporting cast, which is always seen in Scorcese movies, is just great. They include Jodie Foster as a teenage hustler, Harvey Keitel as her pimp, and Peter Boyle as a confused Manhattan cab driver.

You may want to argue with “Taxi Driver” at the end, and with good reasons, but you won’t waste your time with it. Go see the film if you haven’t, you will love it. Especially since this film has the famous De Niro line where he looks in his mirror and says, “You talkin’ to me?” This film deserves a solid 10.

I hope you enjoyed the first entry to Scorcese/De Niro month. Stay tuned next week when I review the next film of these two juggernauts.