Taxi Driver

Martin Scorsese is well regarded as one of the most famous movie directors of all time. Starting off his career back in 1967, Scorsese has helped created several famous movies that helped place him the realms of directors that helped shape cinema like Brian de Palma and Francis Ford Coppola. His films are known for their depiction of violence and a liberal use of profanity and rock music, and most of his early work explored themes of Italian American identity, Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption, faith, machismo, crime, and tribalism. While all of his work between the 1970s-80s had a largely similar atmosphere and presence (even having then newcomer actor Robert de Niro star in most of them), Taxi Driver was arguably one of the first that truly blew everybody away in a manner that definitely cemented him as one of the true greats. Set in the decaying and morally bankrupt streets of New York following the Vietnam War, the film tells the story of Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro), a man who feels aimlessly lost without purpose and stability and dedicates his sleepless nights to driving around the people that he views as filthy and immoral as a taxi driver. Falling to insanity after deciding to assassinate both presidential candidate Charles Palantine (played by Leonard Harris) of whom the woman he loves, a campaign volunteer named Betsy (played by Cybil Shepard) works for, and Matthew Higgins (played by Harvey Keitel) the pimp of an underage prostitute named Iris (played by Jodie Foster), whatever shred of humanity that was left coursing through his body may finally be lost forever as he decides to focus all his attention on Iris and trying to latch onto the notion that he is someone still the hero of this story. Being a commercial and critical success upon releasing and receiving four Oscar nominations, Taxi Driver seemed to a film that many viewed as one of the best movies ever created. However, watching the movie just as it is may not give off that impression as there is a lot of things about the film that don’t work in the traditional sense. It’s important to figure out what the movie really means on a deeper look into the film, what it appears to be on a surface level and whether or not these aspects truly work in the long run.

The initial set-up for the movie, which comes from the mind of Scorsese and screenwriter, Paul Schrader, seems to hearken back to a lot of famously controversial people and less than perfect time periods that shaped the environment and by extension the world into a grittier and more unpleasant place. The inspiration for a lot of the film came from other sources which focuses on vengeance-taking plots or people that were on missions to wipe out the wicked, with movies like The Searchers, and even real-life diary readings from Arthur Bremer, the man who shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972. Throughout a majority of the movie, the narration by De Niro feels particularly specific to the mind-set of what a person like Bremer would have written down while planning his attack, and this almost religious mindset of ‘’purging the world of the wicked’’ comes through as a majority of the people seen in the movie are less than lovable, even the main character himself. The film does a great job at setting up its atmosphere and environment as being unclean, brutal, and un-connectable for anyone that thinks otherwise, even the cab itself feels like a sealed coffin for the main character looking out at the horrors on the streets. The real-life connections to attempted assassination and even previous Vietnam War veterans who lost themselves on the battlefield mentally helps to ground the movie in this unpleasant environment, yet the cinematography, coloured lighting and isolated environment of the cab makes it feel also other-worldly and dream-like at the same time. However, what it succeeds with feeling, it misses in complexity, with the mental break of the main character not feeling dissected or analysis, rather exploited and marginalized to being pretty one-note and therefore not really giving much of an exploration of the raised question, but rather just a basic showcase of it. The movie’s pacing seems to separate the legitimately engaging narrative from the overall experience quite a bit, with the main dilemma of saving a girl from prostitution only coming in during the last thirty mins whilst the rest of the flick focuses on an entirely different plot point. The opening two acts worked as visual representations of what sick people can act like; be it overly obsessing on a specific person, being unresponsive and socially awkward to the rest of the world (whether due to their own fear or active rejection from said world), dedicating a lot of time to their home environment, and even the unexplained reasoning for the actions that he does. The film could have used more time on the central focus to make the ending feel a bit more clear-cut, instead of a shakily ambiguous finish that again feels more openly vague for the sake of representing an encompassing theme rather than in service of itself (which maybe could’ve worked if other aspects of the story were a little more interesting).

The characters for the film aren’t exactly well defined either; if anything, a majority of them don’t get much screen time overall outside of De Niro. Robert De Niro in the film earned himself Best Actor for his performance and once again, it doesn’t feel like a really complicated role. The lines are spoken softly and inattentively, yet the improvising for the most part leads to a lot of shaky and repeated deliveries. However, it becomes clear after looking at him from a different angle that not only is the audience not supposed to like him (even from the beginning) but he isn’t even really his own character, rather an amalgam of these demented people that tried to hurt others because of a mental instability. It’s why the only really good deeds he does is killing people for others, its why he calls back to several people who tried to assassinate people, its why his past and motivations are never looked into, and its why the ending is left on an ambiguous note which blends between feeling like a triumphant success and a flat-out massacre. His actions lead to a positive for a group of people, but it came at such a bloody cost that it doesn’t feel like a traditional action movie, rather an incident that is stuck in cold-hard reality where no rose-tinted glasses can hide the truth of the action (which is something that Scorsese is pretty good at doing especially in showcasing something brutal). Jodie Foster is honestly pretty good for the short screen time she is given as the young prostitute who is way in over her head about the dangerous lifestyle, she’s throwing herself into, but that only makes it even stranger when she’s barely focused on throughout the majority of the movie. Instead of her worming her way into his life gradually and becoming a second main character, she just kind of forcibly gets involved during the final sections of the movie just so that it can have a climax. The side characters are performed fairly well by some pretty famous names like Cybil Shepard, Harvey Keitel, Albert Brooks, and Peter Boyle, and even though their characters are still very reliant on what they represent, their minimal screen time at least makes that element feel a little more acceptable.

The movie feels like a broken-down city that not only feels defeated and dirty, but also still surprisingly bustling with life and energy, it’s just in the wrong areas of where that energy should be used. The look of this film is a nice blend between dirty psychedelic awareness and dirty gritty reality, never being too submerged in the griminess of the city to the point that it feels bland and lazy in its production design, but also never too out there and creative looking to the point that it forgets the cruelty of the environments and time period its portraying. A lot of the shots in the film by cinematographer Michael Chapman aren’t only in reference to movies like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man and Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash but do a great job at laying out the atmosphere of this environment to be claustrophobic and still as ice. The cab scenes feel very closed in and uncomfortable, yet the streets are littered with flashy colors and constant movement that contrasts pretty effectively. The day times scenes are more crowded, yet somehow feel more uncomfortable due to the lack of music creating this unpleasant feeling. The jazzy like music done by Bernard Herrmann (whom this movie is dedicated to after passing away after he completed working on this film) is a nice contrast to the feral, uncivilized actions of a lot of the characters and strangely enough doesn’t feel out of place for this movie. The drastic difference in the writing, however, stands out as pretty noticeably different. While the narration from the main character can be well written and nicely done, most of the dialogue scenes feel very ad-libbed and not well thought-out which makes most scenes feel uncomfortable in a bad way. In some respects, this works if it wants to portray his mind in such an unhinged way, but the fact that his mental health isn’t really explained in an interesting way means it’s hard to accept that excuse.

Taxi Driver is a difficult movie to pin down. From a basic viewpoint, the movie is nothing special, honestly even a bit boring. The story is pretty hollow and doesn’t have good set-up, the characters aren’t very interesting, and the best conflict isn’t addressed til it’s too late to focus on it, the acting is effective but nothing ground-breaking, and the visuals and atmosphere are good and memorable, but feel like they take front and centre over the actual important elements of the movie. Its bizarrely through these elements however that proved that this film needs to be view from a different mindset; the story itself is bland and confused to represent an experience rather than a cinematic narrative, the characters aren’t really their own creations, rather molds for other real-life individuals to be presented through, and the atmosphere becomes so dream-like yet brutally real because it wants to mirror the feeling that a person like this would go through when being isolated and mentally breaking down. It’s not a movie that can be really enjoyed, but it feels like one that should be respected for what it wanted to showcase and even in some ways, the effective ways it did show them off. Clearly a favourite for many and while definitely containing some impressive qualities, this confused picture is one that will require a few unique mindsets to properly gage how to feel about it