Released in 1976, with Scorsese still a precocious young director full of promise, and De Niro a rangy, sinewy actor fresh from his breakout roles in Mean Streets and The Godfather Part II, the film was an immediate sensation. With a blistering script by Paul Schrader, cinematography by Michael Chapman, and a jazz score equal parts mournful and menacing by Bernard Hermmann, Taxi Driver is sublime.
Perhaps the best character study put to screen, it is the story of Travis Bickle, a disaffected Vietnam vet who, unable to sleep at night, takes a job as a cabbie. His is a lurid world of porn parlours and street hustlers, and Travis folds into it fully, a shadow slinking along streets bristling with darker shadows still.
Early in the film he meets Betsy (Cybill Shepherd, never better than here), a political campaign aide, and he invites her for coffee and pie, and then to a movie. Betsy doesn’t know what to think of Travis, he is unlike anyone she has ever met, an animal creeping in from the cold, wild, coiled - and, despite herself, she is intrigued.
But it quickly becomes clear precisely how unsocialised Travis is, how far from the frequency of polite, and safe, society he vibrates. Betsy’s radar goes haywire - as does ours - and she runs away.
And thus begins Travis’s inexorable decline into isolation and paranoia and violence.
De Niro is so natural. He utterly embodies the lost loner, every cell in his body existing as Travis, reclusive, searching for but unable to find connection, wounded, inept, stuck. He is stuck in his thoughts, stuck in his conceptions, stuck in his ruminative loops circling what he attaches to as the causes for his malaise. Travis is a study in mental illness and derangement, yet through De Niro’s masterful work he is as human and easy to follow through the narrative as any character in film.
Scorsese’s camera, too, brings Travis and his environment to life. Shots are erratic, spasmodic, filled with an urgency of movement, yet delicate and even sensual when they need to be too. Watch when Travis is on the phone failing to communicate with Betsy, and the camera gently leaves his side, comes to rest peering sadly down an empty corridor, Travis’s mind and future splayed out in peeling paintwork for all to see.
And then there is that crescendo of violence, as shocking and distressing on the fifth viewing as the first. It is captivating, sure, but we are repulsed even as we are drawn to it, provided no space to which to turn away.
And then the final scenes, making an ironic comment, as many have ventured, about the simplistic and sanctimonious nature of the media, or about how in the sickness of 70s New York, it turns out Travis’s deeds are entirely normal.
But there’s more to it than that, I think. Travis, in the end, is a true hero. Not in the moral sense, but beyond good and evil - he is a man willing to wrestle with the universe and accept the consequences whole of heart.
In the bourgeois world of Betsy and the rest, men like Travis are initially seen as dangerous, whereas the pimps and teenage prostitutes are fine, so long as they stay in their allotted areas. Travis is terrifying precisely because he does not see, or refuses to abide by, societal rules. Harvey Keitel’s pimp Sport (Christ, Keitel is good), for all his deplorability, moves to the same tune as Betsy and the prim uptown aides. He knows what is allowed and what is not. There is a tacit order to the universe, and it carries every other character along. But Travis is an iconoclast; he glides between the currents, makes up his own steps.
This initially puts him at odds with the rest of mankind, and spirals him into chaos. But ultimately he does not compromise, and in his last meeting with Betsy we can see that he has become a master of both worlds, no longer held in sway, free to come and go as he pleases - even if, as that final skipped-frame glance in the mirror hints, his future will not necessarily be one of peace and contentment.
Taxi Driver is a complex and thematically rich work of pulp art, technically accomplished and easy to appreciate on the surface, but with so very much shifting and grinding way down below. A film to watch every five years for the rest of your life.
Perhaps the best character study put to screen, it is the story of Travis Bickle, a disaffected Vietnam vet who, unable to sleep at night, takes a job as a cabbie. His is a lurid world of porn parlours and street hustlers, and Travis folds into it fully, a shadow slinking along streets bristling with darker shadows still.
Early in the film he meets Betsy (Cybill Shepherd, never better than here), a political campaign aide, and he invites her for coffee and pie, and then to a movie. Betsy doesn’t know what to think of Travis, he is unlike anyone she has ever met, an animal creeping in from the cold, wild, coiled - and, despite herself, she is intrigued.
But it quickly becomes clear precisely how unsocialised Travis is, how far from the frequency of polite, and safe, society he vibrates. Betsy’s radar goes haywire - as does ours - and she runs away.
And thus begins Travis’s inexorable decline into isolation and paranoia and violence.
De Niro is so natural. He utterly embodies the lost loner, every cell in his body existing as Travis, reclusive, searching for but unable to find connection, wounded, inept, stuck. He is stuck in his thoughts, stuck in his conceptions, stuck in his ruminative loops circling what he attaches to as the causes for his malaise. Travis is a study in mental illness and derangement, yet through De Niro’s masterful work he is as human and easy to follow through the narrative as any character in film.
Scorsese’s camera, too, brings Travis and his environment to life. Shots are erratic, spasmodic, filled with an urgency of movement, yet delicate and even sensual when they need to be too. Watch when Travis is on the phone failing to communicate with Betsy, and the camera gently leaves his side, comes to rest peering sadly down an empty corridor, Travis’s mind and future splayed out in peeling paintwork for all to see.
And then there is that crescendo of violence, as shocking and distressing on the fifth viewing as the first. It is captivating, sure, but we are repulsed even as we are drawn to it, provided no space to which to turn away.
And then the final scenes, making an ironic comment, as many have ventured, about the simplistic and sanctimonious nature of the media, or about how in the sickness of 70s New York, it turns out Travis’s deeds are entirely normal.
But there’s more to it than that, I think. Travis, in the end, is a true hero. Not in the moral sense, but beyond good and evil - he is a man willing to wrestle with the universe and accept the consequences whole of heart.
In the bourgeois world of Betsy and the rest, men like Travis are initially seen as dangerous, whereas the pimps and teenage prostitutes are fine, so long as they stay in their allotted areas. Travis is terrifying precisely because he does not see, or refuses to abide by, societal rules. Harvey Keitel’s pimp Sport (Christ, Keitel is good), for all his deplorability, moves to the same tune as Betsy and the prim uptown aides. He knows what is allowed and what is not. There is a tacit order to the universe, and it carries every other character along. But Travis is an iconoclast; he glides between the currents, makes up his own steps.
This initially puts him at odds with the rest of mankind, and spirals him into chaos. But ultimately he does not compromise, and in his last meeting with Betsy we can see that he has become a master of both worlds, no longer held in sway, free to come and go as he pleases - even if, as that final skipped-frame glance in the mirror hints, his future will not necessarily be one of peace and contentment.
Taxi Driver is a complex and thematically rich work of pulp art, technically accomplished and easy to appreciate on the surface, but with so very much shifting and grinding way down below. A film to watch every five years for the rest of your life.
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