Taxi Driver (1976)

DIRECTOR(S): Martin Scorsese SCREENPLAY: Paul Schrader CAST: Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Peter Boyle, Harvey Keitel, Albert Brooks, Leonard Harris, Martin Scorsese


What is there left to say about Martin Scorsese's seminal Taxi Driver that hasn't been said already? Not much. Since its inclusion as 47th greatest American movie of all time on AFI's trite "100 Years...100 movies" list, Scorsese's masterpiece has been consistently praised as that 70's classic--a label that, although certainly true, misconstrues the rather modest scope of the film. In its seedy, gritty presentation, Taxi Driver is, without a doubt, an essential 70's movie; yet what is essential about the film is not the milieu which the film evokes, but how it is evoked.

Taxi Driver is as much an aesthetic accomplishment as a historical one. Like Carol Reed's classic 1949 The Third Man, Scorsese's film arises more in everything that is occurring around its main character, Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle, a loner who takes up the job of a taxi driver in order to cope with his chronic insomnia. A war veteran from Vietnam, Travis serves as the film's eye: everything that occurs around him, often internalized by his stream-of-conciousness voice-over, is very much aestheticized to fit his own subjectivity. His view is that New York is filthy--a corrupt city crawling with lowlifes, drug-addicts, prostitutes and pornos. Taxi Driver operates around this setting, a mise-en-scene marked by its gritty color-palette--a mixture of toned down street colors--and remarkable claustrophobia. Shots are always measured to match Travis's subjectivity, such as when a disgruntled man asks Travis while in his cab if he sees his wife in an apartment across the street: reverse shots are measured, and the claustrophobia is measured more in the framing of the cab and its containment.

But despite the feeling of claustrophobia that the film exudes, it's the spacing in the film, what lies around Travis and his lonely cab, that gives Taxi Driver its wonderful historicism. Even when the camera focuses on Travis's lonely nights, everything is in the background: shots of New York City--movie theaters, shops, other cars, people-- are measured upon his own voice-overs and Bernard Hermann's jazzy score; the camera always lingers, for at least a second, to absorb the greater ambiance of a city caught by its sleaziness. That sleaziness, as Travis would view it, is the 70's itself, and in documenting, through one eye, a greater atmosphere, Scorsese's film becomes a much more intimate film than immediately realized--a film essential not for its grand scope but its modest pitting of a man caught in the masses of a society he cannot stand.