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TAXI DRIVER
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Red: the color of sin. I had never noticed it on my first viewing, but upon another viewing last night, I noticed that the city of New York is drenched in red. This is how Travis sees the city. He sees it as drenched in sin, or, as he said, "an open sewer" of human filth. And it’s that human filth that drives Travis insane.
Taxi Driver is driven more by it’s character, ex-Marine Travis Bickle, then it is by any specific plot. Travis can’t sleep. He tries visiting porno theatres to pass the nights, but that isn’t working, so he diecides to get a job as, of course, a taxi driver. Travis requests to work long hours at night, when "all the animals come out". A great deal of the film is spent with Travis, as heroams the streets in his cab.
One of the themes the film touches on, it’s main theme, isisolation. Travis is an isolated young man. In a few scenes, we see Travis in a diner, talking with a group of "friends". When he is with them, you can see that he seems disinterested by them. He cannot relate to other people. And he especially can’t relate to women. He falls for a woman working on a Senator’s campaign for the presidency, and when he takes her out on their first date, he brings her to a porno theatre.
A young prostitute gets into Travis’s cab, only to be pulled out by her pimp. He has another sighting of this young girl walking on the streets during the day. The third time he sees her, he decides to do something for her. He pays for some time with her, and then offers to "get her out of here". The thing is, she doesn’t want to leave.
By the time the film comes to it’s finale, Travis has come from being a seemingly harmless insomniac, to a mowhawk-wearing, armed-to-the-teeth psychopath, hell-bent on cleaning up the streets. After a failed political assination, he goes on a bloody rampage to free the young prostitute, and is called a hero for his actions. Director Martin Scorsese points out something here that is all too true: We, the public, celebrate the wrong things. This is a man who went on a psychotic killing spree, and he is hailed as a hero.
Much has been noted about the near-perfect all-around acting in Taxi Driver. Robert DeNiro gave his career’s best performance, even to this date, as the insane Travis Bickle. Jodie Foster shows maturity at the age of twelve, playing the young prostite Iris. Harvey Keitel plays Iris’s pimp, Matthew, also known as sport. He is only in a few scenes, but makes a great impression on us inthose scenes. And finally, Cybill Shepard is great as the campaign worker Travis falls for.
Taxi Driver’s score is haunting and brilliant. It it one of the best scores by one of the best composers of the day, Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann died the night after finishing Taxi Driver’s score. It’s sad that his best turned out to be his last.
My Rating: Masterpiece
Review by Jared Mills
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