Grade: F+
When it came to cinemas in 1976, Pauline Kael wrote that “No other film [had] ever dramatized urban indifference [as] powerfully” as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Both Sight & Sound and Empire have put this alleged psychological thriller on their lists of greatest films twice. It’s preserved in the US National Film Registry. Taxi Driver is the most famous film about nothing at all.
NYC Taxi driver Travis Bickle, the film’s protagonist played by Robert De Niro, is a monument to inaction. This city is filthy and someone needs to clean it up, he tells the politician he picks up for a fare one night. I’m paraphrasing and making Travis sound much more articulate than he really is. In the film, his indignation against the state of the world comes in gutted prose. This is how he expresses himself in his diary in a later scene: “Listen you fuckers, you screwheads, here is a man who would not take it anymore, a man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, here is someone who stood up.” Travis speaks in shopping lists of slang, cliched and trite abuse.
I can understand why filth would be stinking up Travis’s mind. Scorsese filmed Taxi Driver on site in New York City during a sanitation strike. Rubbish lies spilt and piled up on every street corner. Travis meets a prostitute named Iris and finds out she’s only 12 years old. One night, he picks up a passenger, drives the passenger to an apartment, and the passenger tells Travis how he’s going to go up to that apartment, confront his unfaithful wife and her lover and stick a gun up his wife’s pussy. Travis meets a new shade of rot on every street corner when he takes his cab out to work every night. Critics including Kael got it right when they called the New York of Taxi Driver Hell.
Yet for all Travis’s internal raging against this Hell he traverses every night, he does absolutely nothing about it. You’ll read in the film’s plot synopsis that he plans to assassinate a political candidate. That’s just a side plot. He spends most of the film watching people. Sometimes he’ll talk to them but he does it very badly. “I felt that when I walked in that there was something between us,” he tells a pretty political staffer he tries to woo. Travis’s tongue is cardboard and all his crusading thoughts stay bottled up inside his head.
I’m not surprised. One day a rain will come and wash the scum off the streets, Travis tells himself but he has no reason to become the rain. The “scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth” haven’t done anything to him. He’s not Batman or Dave Bannion in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat or Paul Kersey in Michael Winner’s Death Wish and noone he loves has been murdered, raped or even robbed by the people he spits on in his mind. The rot is festering around him but never on him. He’s a wannabee vigilante with nothing to take revenge for.
So of course he spends almost the entire film spinning around and around like his cab’s wheels. In the climax where he (for some unarticulated reason) shoots a pimp, I wanted to cheer. “Finally,” I thought. “Something’s finally happened.”