Rating: R
Genre:
Drama
Release Date: 06/01/1999
SubTitles: English/Espanol/Por/Chi/Kor/Tha
Dubbed: English
Sound: 2
Run Time: 114 Minutes
Distributor/Studio: Columbia TriStar
"All the animals come out at night" -- and one of them is a cabby about to snap. In
Martin Scorsese's classic 1970s
drama, insomniac ex-Marine
Travis Bickle (
Robert De Niro) works the nightshift, driving his cab throughout decaying mid-'70s New York City, wishing for a "real rain" to wash the "scum" off the neon-lit streets. Chronically alone,
Travis cannot connect with anyone, not even with such other cabbies as blowhard
Wizard (
Peter Boyle). He becomes infatuated with vapid blonde presidential campaign worker
Betsy (
Cybill Shepherd), who agrees to a date and then spurns
Travis when he cluelessly takes her to a
porno movie. After an encounter with a malevolent fare (played by
Scorsese), the increasingly paranoid
Travis begins to condition (and arm) himself for his imagined destiny, a mission that mutates from assassinating
Betsy's candidate,
Charles Palatine (
Leonard Harris), to violently "saving" teen hooker
Iris (
Jodie Foster) from her pimp,
Sport (
Harvey Keitel).
Travis' bloodbath turns him into a media hero; but has it truly calmed his mind?
Written by
Paul Schrader,
Taxi Driver is an homage to and reworking of cinematic influences, a study of individual psychosis, and an acute diagnosis of the latently violent, media-fixated Vietnam era.
Scorsese and
Schrader structure
Travis' mission to save
Iris as a
film noir version of
John Ford's late
Western The Searchers (1956), aligning
Travis with a mythology of American heroism while exposing that myth's obsessively violent underpinnings. Yet
Travis' military record and assassination attempt, as well as
Palatine's political platitudes, also ground
Taxi Driver in its historical moment of American in the 1970s. Employing such techniques as
Godardian jump cuts and ellipses, expressive camera moves and angles, and garish colors, all punctuated by
Bernard Herrmann's eerie final score (finished the day he died),
Scorsese presents a Manhattan skewed through
Travis' point-of-view, where
De Niro's now-famous "You talkin' to me" improv becomes one more sign of
Travis' madness. Shot during a New York summer heat wave and garbage strike,
Taxi Driver got into trouble with the MPAA for its violence.
Scorsese desaturated the color in the final shoot-out and got an R, and
Taxi Driver surprised its unenthusiastic studio by becoming a box-office hit. Released in the Bicentennial year, after Vietnam, Watergate, and attention-getting attempts on
President Ford's life,
Taxi Driver's intense portrait of a man and a society unhinged spoke resonantly to the mid-'70s audience -- too resonantly in the case of attempted
Reagan assassin and
Foster fan
John W. Hinckley.
Taxi Driver went on to win the Palme d'Or at the
Cannes Film Festival, but it lost the Best Picture Oscar to the more comforting
Rocky. Anchored by
De Niro's disturbing embodiment of "God's lonely man,"
Taxi Driver remains a striking milestone of both
Scorsese's career and 1970s Hollywood.
~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
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