Taxi Driver

Quite possibly my favourite film of all time and the one that motivated me towards film analysis in general. Whether it be from peripheral and misguided identification with the central character's alienation, or the way the film captures 1970s New York City in all it's scumsucking grottiness, I don't know. There's just something about it that speaks to me. It also doesn't hurt that De Niro gives one of the greatest performances of all time, and that every single shot is a dazzling tour-de-force into the personal space of an unforgettable icon of alienation.

At the heart of Taxi Driver is the story of Travis Bickle (De Niro). Travis is a loner and Vietnam veteran who takes to driving a cab around the worst parts of New York in order to fill in the night hours opened up by his insomnia. He decides to volunteer his services to the campaign for Senator Palantine in order to meet a girl, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), and woefully attempts to romance her by taking her to a porno theatre. His increasing failure to intergrate with society (and general disgust with the underbelly of New York) begins to manifest itself in anti-social ways. He constructs a plan to assassinate Senator Palantine and fantasizes about saving a 12 year old prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster) from her mafia-connected pimp (Harvey Keital), building a special arsenal of weapons concealed around his body to help him get the job done.

I have to admit that I have resisted any attempt to review or discuss this film at any length for a long, long time. I've always been afraid that I could never do written justice to how much I love this film, or the depth of thought I've given it. It's been a while since I've watched it so I feel distant enough from it at the moment to give it a cursory overview. With this mind, I'd like to say that there is so much to this film that this review can't even touch, I can't even begin to express a small fraction of it's brilliance.

On a thematic level, Taxi Driver is essentially about crossing the line between fantasy and reality. Director Martin Scorcese has made a long and accomplished career out of examining individuals who have failed to integrate with society - ranging from his classics (Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Goodfellas) through to his more recent films (Shutter Island, The Aviator) and his less-appreciated works (The King of Comedy, The Last Temptation of Christ). Taxi Driver embodies this theme completely, Travis is a man who yearns to act out the normal life of a film protagonist - he wants to get the girl (Betsy), humiliate the rival (Tom, played by Albert Brooks), rescue the damsel in distress (Iris), and be the hero. He fails on some level to accomplish any of these things... there is suggestion that Iris is better off under the tutelage of her pimp, the girl he wants is unsuitable for him, and his confrontation with Tom only makes him look unhinged.

A great key to understanding this film lies in it's continuity errors. If you watch Travis's haircut closely you'll notice that it changes length throughout the film... I'm not just talking about the kamikaze mohawk he sports towards the end. If you watch him closely his hair changes from a regular haircut to something like an outgrown buzz cut and then back again. By piecing these scenes together into a haircut-friendly continuity, you can locate some of the film's original narrative (it can also be seen in the film's script). In the script, Travis's attempt to kill Palantine can be seen as a direct reaction to Betsy's rejection of him (it may even be possible that he intends to kill Besty, not Palantine). The scene where Travis buys guns is actually meant to follow on from his conversation with the babbling trigger-happy customer he picks up in his cab (played by Martin Scorcese), and the way Charle T knowingly calls him "killer" is actually meant to take place after his grocery-store altercation. There are lots of other scenes like this that - if viewed in the scripted order - make a lot more sense of Travis's actions.

The point of reshuffling of all these scenes into a non-linear fashion is that Travis's motivations become less knowable to the viewer. The workings of his mind become less connected to the traditional cause-and-effect cycle, and as a result it deconstructs the role of Travis as a regular hero or villain. In the end he's just deranged, and the way Scorcese has re-edited the script into a new sequence of scenes taps into Travis's failure to follow the traditional character arc afforded to most cinematic protagonists. It's all part of why Taxi Driver is such a perfect film.

Moving on from such lofty notions, Taxi Driver remains incredibly watchable if only for De Niro's to-the-wire performance. He dominates the entire film with an intense magnetism whilst never truly letting the audience in. Travis is the ultimate loser, contradictorily sympathetic and repulsive to the very end. The ending itself is a beautiful, almost fairytale-like sequence of violence that leads to a powerfully ambiguous final shot. If you're yet to see Taxi Driver I implore you to take a crawl through hell with Travis, you'll never forget it. There's no other film like it, it's one of the true American masterpieces of the 1970s.