Film #11: Taxi Driver

What's going down?
Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) is a mentally disturbed Vietnam veteran who gets a job as a night-shift taxi driver to deal with his insomnia. As Bickle becomes more and more angry with the decaying city he lives in and the human scum that populate it, he becomes attracted to campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Sheperd) and meets twelve-year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster). After blowing a potential relationship with Betsy, he decides that he must do whatever it takes to change the world he lives in to suit his vision, and begins plotting to assassinate a presidential candidate.

Who's in it?
Robert DeNiro, at his seventies peak, presents Travis Bickle as a man who stands in a gray area between good and evil; he is far from being a hero and his grim philosophy of change by violence is disturbing, but his stubborn determination to liberate Iris from her life as a prostitute keeps him from becoming a villain in the audience's eyes. Ultimately, he is a man with no attachment to the world he lives in, only seeing the corruption and decay that he encounters every night, wishing to erase it all, and surprised when he finds good in the world and in himself. Jodie Foster as Iris jars the audience in a different way: innocence and obscenity collide in the form of her performance. The best example of this is the ironic scene in which she and Bickle converse over breakfast, with the young girl exposing the evils of the world to the confused and violent Bickle (after all, how much lower can society go than child prostitutes?). Harvey Keitel plays Sport, Iris's pimp and lover, painting the character with an obscenity and sleaze that make the audience hate him from the moment he opens his mouth. Sport is a living symbol of everything Bickle hates about society, and his fate unfolds accordingly.

How's the production?
Martin Scorsese paints an ugly, grimy, gritty portrait of New York as an urban hell populated by lowlifes, deadbeats, criminals and prostitutes, a world with little redeeming quality or hope. The film is framed by voiceover readings from Bickle's journal, which present a side of Bickle we don't otherwise see in his character; the entries show intelligence and insight into Bickle's perception of the world and the events that he is part of. The saxophone score by Bernard Herrmann lends the film some character as well, playing over scenes of Bickle driving the streets of New York at night, observing the grim world in inhabits.

The Greatest Scene:
As previously mentioned, it's Bickle's breakfast conversation with Iris. The scene establishes Iris's character and develops Bickle's, showing us a side of him we haven't seen before, revealing him to have some redeeming qualities in his desire to liberate Iris from her nasty profession, rather than take advantage of her (even if such a desire does play out in violence in the end). As previously mentioned, though, the best part of the scene is the irony.

Personal Impressions:
New York has never looked as unappealing as it does here. Scorsese's direction and DeNiro's performance create a vision that disturbs, shocks, and unnerves the viewer. Between the film's gritty location and mentally unstable and violent protagonist, the audience is taken out of their comfort zone; even the films one ray of innocence (Iris) is twisted and polluted. In the seventies, this film must have been truly groundbreaking, and even today, it puts the viewer on edge and forces them to look at a side of life they may try to avoid.