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= 4 stars

Starring Robert DeNiro, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster
Directed by Martin Scorsese

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If Taxi Driver were made today, I fear it would be retooled into a romantic comedy: Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) and Tom (Albert Brooks) would be the main characters, with Travis Bickle, the taxi driver (Robert DeNiro), reduced to a weirdo Betsy hopelessly dates, discarded well before the third act. After a political campaign rally, where a tense assassination attempt is thwarted, Tom proposes to Betsy, and they drive off to a romantic weekend in the Hamptons.

Taxi Driver is quite the opposite. It unfolds from the point of view of the anti-hero, Travis Bickle. He drives a cab because he can’t sleep and wants to work a long night shift. His New York life is filled with emptiness. He has no close friends, lives in a tiny run-down apartment, and spends his leisure time going to x-rated movies. Basing a film around such a loner character should be a disaster, but Robert DeNiro’s method acting is able to make difficult scenes, such as arguing with himself in a mirror, captivating.

The film begins with Travis being hired at the taxi office. We learn of his military background. We’re introduced to the seedy underbelly of Manhattan night life. He picks up the scum of the earth: hookers, pimps, adulterers, drug dealers, and drops them off. He’s their servant. He wipes up blood and semen from the taxi seats. He hopes for a rain to come and wash away all the garbage.

An unintended consequence of urban life is a tendency for people to become desensitized to each other, and come across as cold and distant. Travis’s environment and vocation set him as an observer, voyeur, and invisible servant. In a city of several million it’s ironically easy (and possibly necessary) to become somewhat anonymous. But there is still a basic desire to connect with others. Travis tries futilely to pick up a girl at a peep show. The result is a sexually frustrated individual, and results in deeper loneliness.

Campaign worker Betsy becomes the romantic fixation of Travis. Cybill Shepherd is effective playing the wary innocent, who calls blue-collar Travis a “walking contradiction.” Betsy represents to Travis a vision of idealized love, a woman who is well above the city’s garbage. Travis takes her out for pie. Her cultural references fall flat on Travis. It’s obvious they’re worlds apart, in a New York kind of way: Upper East Side meets Harlem. He takes her to a movie, which unfortunately, is an x-rated one. Betsy stomps out of the theater, duly offended, and Travis can’t understand what he did wrong.

Travis, spurned by Betsy, turns his obsessions towards a 12-year-old hooker (Jodie Foster). He takes her to breakfast (paralleling Betsy’s pie date) and tries hopelessly to explain to her how terrible and immoral her situation is. Travis decides he must save her in the only way he knows how. He procures a huge arsenal of guns (phallic representations duly noted), and uses his military training to plan a brutal revenge on the pimp (Harvey Keitel), hotel owner, and whomever else gets in his way.

As the course of events plays out, Travis says he “never had a choice.” Here’s a film that attempts to answer the unanswerable: how people who commit unspeakable acts justify their course of actions. The film argues it’s not always simple insanity. At least in the mind of the perpetrator, there is a clear sequence of events and reasons inevitably pushing them towards their “destiny.” We see several instances where people or events unintentionally aid Travis on his course: the taxi driver friend who sells Travis his guns, Betsy, who doesn’t return his calls, the convenience store robbery where Travis gains confidence that he can enact justice above the law. Taxi Driver became part of a real person’s sequence of events: supposedly it inspired the Reagan assassination attempt, and said perpetrator had a film-mirroring obsession with actress Jodie Foster.

The movie’s final scenes demonstrate how in some situations the perpetrators of extreme violence become heroes. In a nation that practices the death penalty and wages war to practice peace, violence can sometimes be embraced as a positive solution. There’s debate whether Travis’s final cab ride is real or imagined. We don’t know if Travis has emerged from his coma. His hair has suddenly grown back. Lastly, what are we to make of the very quick, brief sound and move to fast motion just before the credits roll? Is it death itself? The ambiguity leaves us with an uncertain feeling of completion which is appropriate: our interpretation is likely a result of our view of Travis’s final act as favorable or unfavorable; whether or not we believe Travis should be condemned to death or have a chance at closure with the unattainable Betsy.

The camera in Taxi Driver is used in some fabulous ways. My favorite is slow movement showing deep thought or formations of opinion, such as when Betsy first meets Travis, or when Travis stares deeply into his cup of alka-seltzer, slipping into his own world. The final scenes of Travis’s flip out include a powerful, laborious overhead shot which allows us contemplative time and space to create cathartic distance from the preceding carnage.

Taxi Driver is a strong example of the film excellence of the seventies. It makes a distasteful subject work, through some stellar performances and directing. I’m quite glad it wouldn’t be attempted today.

IMDB: Taxi Driver
Wikipedia: Taxi Driver
Rotten Tomatoes: Taxi Driver 100%