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Robert De Niro embodies dangerous loners everywhere in Taxi Driver |
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Robert De Niro (Travis Bickle), Jodie Foster (Iris),
Cybill Shepherd (Betsy), Albert Brooks (Tom), Harvey Keitel (Sport/Matthew),
Leonard Harris (Charles Palantine), Peter Boyle (Wizard), Harry Northup (Doughboy),
Steven Prince (Easy Andy), Martin Scorsese (Passenger)
A grungy taxi ploughs through the neon-lit back alleys of
New York, the glow of stop signs and tail lights washing the car in a hellish
red glare. Inside that taxi, the interior monologue of its driver tips ever
closer towards paranoia and fantasy. It’s no surprise that something is going
to give. Martin Scorsese’s influential Taxi
Driver is the definitive exploration of fractured psyches, the key text in
film for exploring how isolation, loneliness and an inability to connect with
people can tip someone into being a danger to others.
Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is our taxi driver, an
honourably discharged Vietnam vet who can’t sleep so works the night shifts. He’s
seemingly quiet, shy, self-contained but this hides a desperation to connect
with the world, a horror at what he sees around him that he can’t understand, a
paranoid disgust at the crime and dirt he feels infect the street and a desire
to be someone or do something. His
failure to understand to or relate to the world on any level will eventually
lead to a gradual collapse as Bickle determines that he must lash out at
something, must attack something, to make himself a place in the world.
Taxi Driver is
such a brilliant analysis of disaffection and confusion at the world, such an
insightful understanding of how feeling separate and locked out from events
around them can make a person feel they must act to make their mark, that it
profoundly influenced the motivations of Ronald Reagan’s would-be-assassin John
Hinckley Jnr in 1981. The film was even screened for the jury as part of
Hinckley’s (successful) defence that he acted due to insanity (Hinckley claimed
he was trying to impress Jodie Foster). Tragic as that is, it speaks something
to the power of the film and its acute understanding (but not excuse) for
lonely, fractured, potentially violent souls like Hinckley.
Scorsese’s direction is pitch-perfect. The film uses a
series of tightly held shots – and some go on for a very long time, staring at
trivial events (such as the shot of an empty corridor while we hear Bickle
being rejected on the phone by his stalking target Betsy) – or stately
intercutting between actors that brilliantly serve to establish both Bickle’s
isolation and his lack of connection. This is intermixed with tighter editing
that captures Bickle’s undirected fury and paranoia towards the real world,
presented as he drives as a concussive collection of sounds and images that
seem to hammer down on the taxi, combined with Bernard Herrmann’s superb
classically tense score, lyrical but haunting.
Every scene Scorsese constructs is designed to show Bickle’s
isolation, his weakness and continual succumbing to fantasy and false
perspectives. His internal monologue has a monotone fluency to it, but talking
to people he’s tongue tied, clumsy or prone to tip into the rantings of a crazy
man. Slow motion camera tracks show Bickle moving through crowds like an alien,
unable to comprehend or understand what he is seeing, later prowling the frame
like a misguided hunter. New York is a hellish underworld – although you are
certain we are seeing it largely as Bickle sees it, every scene filtered
through his disturbed POV (Michael Chapman’s photography by the way is
faultless).
It works so well because De Niro himself is so restrained,
and at first feels rather sweet, even handsome, like someone who you want to
look after or feel sorry for – a million miles from the mohawked gun totter he will
become by the film’s end. He’s quiet, shy and desperate for friends. He can
manage bursts of seeming like a compelling person – his fooling of Cybil
Shepherd’s Betsy into a date is a tribute to his ability in short bursts to
appear charmingly eccentric. The date of course flounders on his inability to
understand human norms (buys her a record she says she has, takes her to a porn
film, points out he has a taxi when she tries to get into one to leave), and
his response to it is of course to get angry and make a scene, to blame the
other person for his own failings.
De Niro immersed himself in the dark psyche of this man, and
never loses touch of the gentleness and vulnerability that underpin his violent
actions. Bickle talks the talk often of a crazy person, but by his own lights
he’s a well-meaning man. It’s just that his well-meaning actions involve
multiple murders, and it’s only by a twist of fate that he guns down a house
full of pimps and gangsters rather than putting a bullet through a Presidential
candidate.
And that’s the scary thing about the film: Bickle is
strangely sympathetic, for all his obvious psychosis. Who hasn’t felt alone and
lost in the world? Who hasn’t felt scared by events around them or dangers
unknown? Who hasn’t wondered “why don’t people like me”? We just deal with it a
lot better than Bickle and his messianic sense of mission that he develops.
Bickle channels what human emotions he can muster or
understand into ciphers he barely knows. These people become totems, or
stalking targets, who he becomes persuaded must be “saved”. With Cybil
Shepherd’s Betsy, the delusion is clear: here is a confident, career woman,
independent and smart, for whom Bickle can feel an attraction but clearly no
understanding at all beyond her being an object he cannot have. The awkwardness
and later stunningly poor judgement and reactions he shows when around her mark
him immediately as a weirdo and danger to others.
But the film’s smarts – and it has a terrific script by Paul
Schrader, whose understanding of dark psyches was never better captured than
here – is that these fixations have a totally different impact when targeted on
a child prostitute. Suddenly, Bickle’s unwanted attentions have the air of righteousness,
even though intellectually he makes no distinction between either Betsy or
Jodie Foster’s Iris (a performance of staggering emotional maturity from an
actress barely 12 at the time). For all Iris is clearly a victim of society and
abuse (in a way Betsy isn’t), for Bickle she’s pretty much the same, someone he
must ‘rescue’ – and from her pimp Sport (a disturbingly fey and incestuous turn
from Harvey Keitel).
So Bickle takes up the guns, and eventually does what we all
wish we could do sometimes. Because who hasn’t stood in front of the mirror and
dreamed about saying “you talkin’ to me” to our enemies – the difference being
most of us don’t fantasise about blowing them away, let alone actually go on to
do it. De Niro’s brilliance is the chilling emptiness behind the exterior, the
way he captures universal fears and doubts but shows us a character who has no
personality of his own but only collects titbits from those around him (like
his would-be murderous passenger – played by Scorsese himself – who eagerly
talks about how he wishes he could murder his cheating wife).
So the violence comes – and it is horrific – as Bickle
shoots up a lowlife prostitute den with sickening graphicness (nothing this
violent had really been seen before). But it’s only fate that has turned him
away from his real target, Senator Palatine (George Lucas must have had this film
in the back of his mind when naming his Evil Emperor!), reverting to his
secondary target and killing a group of people far more acceptable to Joe
Public to be wasted.
Scorsese’s genius final epilogue asks us questions about
truth but also perceptions. The camera takes on a “God’s view” POV overhead
shot as Bickle’s slaughter ends (and De Niro’s jerky, terminator like
physicality here is stupendous), tracking back through the house. Is this his
soul leaving a dying body? But then we flash forward and there is Bickle in the
taxi again, hailed as a hero by society for rescuing the girl – the same
society that would have condemned him as psychopath if he had taken his first
target. He even gets a sympathetic conversation with Betsy.
But he hasn’t changed. And the world hasn’t changed. And
Bickle may be a hero now but the same dark impulses still ride within him – and
they will, the film suggests, lead him to kill again. Scorsese’s film is a
masterpiece of alienation and disaffection, a brilliant analysis of what makes
a killer kill – and how vagaries of fate can see us miss the signs – with a
wonderful script and a superb performance from De Niro, a landmark turn that
manages to tap into such existential fears we all have on our place in the
world that we completely miss we are starting to relate to a psychopath. Dark
and brilliant, a landmark.
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