Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) cannot sleep and takes a job as a taxi driver.
Working long shifts, alienated and lonely, he develops tentative and very different relationships with two women. He wants Betsy (Cybil Shepherd) a campaign worker for senator Palantine, but cannot have her. He can have Iris (Jodie Foster), the 13-year-old prostitute, but does not want her.
Sickened and disgusted by the filth and perversion he sees all around him, Travis decides to take a stand…
Though its scenes of Times Square have been consigned to the history books by ex-Mayor Rudolph Guiliani's campaigns, Taxi Driver has stood the test of time well and remains a landmark of 1970s cinema and a high-water mark in the careers of its three key contributors – Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader.
De Niro, who famously moonlighted as a cab driver in preparation for the role, turns in a flawless, totally compelling performance. (I first saw Taxi Driver as the second half of a double bill with Mean Streets and wouldn't have realised but for the trademark mole that it was De Niro in both films.) Not that it is just a one-man show, with the likes of Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks and the inimitable Harvey Keitel providing superb support.
Scorsese's direction is just as brilliant. Ostensibly objective, his mise-en-scene is in reality almost totally subjective, right from the opening credits, where the taxi emerges, looming, out the smoke, like some beast from hell. We view the world through Travis's eyes, little realising that we have been drawn into identifying with a borderline psychotic's perspective until it is too late.
Against such competition, Schrader's writing cannot but come across as the weakest link. Specifically, the scenes between Travis and Betsy are never quite believable, unless one accepts the argument that they are all in Travis's imagination – always a justification for poor writing in my book.
And while Schrader suggests an unconscious motive underlying Travis's taking Betsy to a porno theatre, I would argue for a more prosaic truth: that, between the time he first scripted the scene and the time it was shot, "porno chic" – when porn films briefly escaped the grindhouse raincoater audience – came and went.
Nevertheless, Schrader is perhaps the only American screenwriter out there who would dare imagine a blend of John Ford's The Searchers ; Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest , A Man Escaped and Pickpocket ; Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Psycho , Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground , Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea , and, last but not least, the diaries of would-be political assassin Arthur Brenner. He's certainly the only one who could pull it off this well.
If you haven't seen Taxi Driver yet, why not?
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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