| Collector's Corner April 2007
 Taxi
Driver
- Starring: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster,
Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel, Leonard Harris, Peter Boyle, Cybill Shepherd
- Director: Martin Scorsese
- Theatrical release: 1976
- DVD release: 2007
- Video: 1.85:1 (widescreen)
- Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0
- Released by: Sony Pictures Entertainment
So Martin Scorsese finally won the Best Director Oscar, for
The Departed. That film is a wonderful piece of ensemble acting, brilliantly
directed, with just enough squirty violence to make us squirm in our seats. But he should
have won his first Oscar exactly 30 years before, for his masterpiece, Taxi Driver.
Of course, a film about a post-stress psychotic with
fantasies both of acting as a cleansing archangel and having harems of whores whom he
converts to Madonnas isn’t your average Hollywood fare. The story of Travis Bickle
(played by Robert De Niro) outraged the Silent Majority when it hit the screens in
1976. And even though it was nominated for four Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best
Actress, Best Music), and Scorsese won a Palme d’Or for it at Cannes, far more people
called for its banning.
In Hollywood, however, the timing was right for antiheroes.
In a world racked by Watergate and Vietnam, artists sensed it might be time for an
audaciously direct stare at the underbelly of the human condition. As Paul Schrader, who
wrote the screenplay, says in the excellent "making-of" featurette on the DVD,
banning violent films doesn’t make violence go away, but we lose a tool with which we
might understand why violence happens. And while Taxi Driver’s gore quotient
was unprecedented, the stage had been set long before by Bonnie and Clyde, The
Wild Bunch, Dirty Harry, and The Godfather. Taxi Driver
was almost inevitable.
Scorsese was then 33 years old. He had received critical
acclaim in 1974 for his gritty Mean Streets (also with De Niro), and public
acclaim for the touching Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1973). But
for years he’d been pushing various producers to give him a green light to make
Schrader’s script into Taxi Driver. Julia and Michael Phillips finally said
they’d back it if Scorsese could get De Niro to play the lead. After his role in
the successful Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) and his Oscar for The Godfather II
(1974), De Niro was a hot property.
De Niro jumped at the chance, and Scorsese started
pulling together a strong cast of actors. Probably the most daring piece of casting was
12-year-old Jodie Foster as a 12-year-old whore named Iris. Foster lights up the screen,
from her first appearance, as she tries to escape her pimp, to her final sobs. Being so
young, she had to have her mother with her at all times. The outcry over this young girl
smoking, whoring, and being witness to mayhem -- along with the gallons of bright red
blood splashed everywhere -- almost earned Taxi Driver an X rating. To get an R,
Scorsese agreed to have Foster’s 20-year-old sister stand in for the racier parts,
and make the blood a muted brown.
Harvey Keitel, who had worked with Scorsese and
De Niro in Mean Streets, captured the role of Iris’s pimp, Sport. He is a
coiled snake, armed and dangerous, with a sarcastic and cynical sense of mirth. Nothing in
the whole film will make your skin crawl like Sport’s dance with Iris in chapter 23.
 Except maybe Travis Bickle’s
appearance in a Mohawk haircut in chapter 24. The crowds separate as he walks through
them. You can feel the power of a man who’s gone crazy and doesn’t care what
happens to him. All that matters is revenge -- for his isolation, his alienation, his
overwhelming despondency. Throughout, De Niro gives a dazzling performance that is
all the more frightening for its slow and understated burn. Bickle has a long fuse, but
its burning is inexorable, and the final explosion resonates. It’s a far more nuanced
portrayal of weird ideation than De Niro’s depiction of boxer Jake La Motta in Raging
Bull (1980), the conventional choice for his and Scorsese’s best work.
In fact, I don’t understand why Raging Bull is
held in higher esteem than Taxi Driver. True, De Niro’s weight
gain of nearly 100 pounds to portray the boozed-out ex-boxer in later life was an amazing
piece of self-endangerment. And every frame of Raging Bull reveals that Scorsese
was now bankable enough to afford the best lighting, cameramen, and editing Hollywood
could offer. But few films have achieved Taxi Driver’s sense of menace, and Raging
Bull wasn’t one of them. Jake La Motta was mean and pathetic. Travis Bickle was
dangerous and sympathetic. The latter is harder to bring off.
What makes Scorsese’s work in Taxi Driver so
sublime, and makes him a hero to his peers, is his passion for the art of film. Only a
handful of directors working in the genre of violence -- Sergio Leone, John Woo, Francis
Ford Coppola, Walter Hill, Sam Peckinpah -- approach film with such kid-in-a-candy-shop
appetite. Scorsese makes films with the guilelessness of a child, the dedication of a
romantic, and a rare devotion to the intelligence of his audience.
 In 2004, Scorsese said about the
Best Director Oscar, "I don’t know how much it means to me anymore. It’s
more about the movie at this point, because I’m too old for it. I think when
you’re young and have that first burst of energy and make five or six pictures in a
row that tell the stories of all the things in life you want to say, well, maybe those are
the films that should have won me the Oscar. When Taxi Driver was up for Best
Picture, it got three other nominations: Best Actor (De Niro), Best Supporting
Actress (Foster), and Best Music (Bernard Herrmann). But the director and writer were
overlooked. I was so disappointed, I said, ‘You know what, that’s the way
it’s going to be.’ What was I going to do, go home and cry? You don’t make
pictures for Oscars."
Scorsese’s referring to himself in the third person as
"the director" is a dead giveaway that he really did care and was tired of being
let down. During the last few years, it’s felt as if Scorsese has been reaching for
an Oscar like a kid trying to catch a brass ring on the merry-go-round. Both The Gangs
of New York and The Aviator had a "Look at me!! Please!" quality, as
if he was begging for his Oscar. The Departed brought him full circle, from the
days of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. Funny how when you stop looking for
something, it eventually appears. Scorsese finally decided to make a great film rather
than an Oscar-winning film. When he quit trying to win, he won.
Scorsese the film lover is now also Scorsese the DVD QC
man. He adds interesting and unusual extras to his DVDs and makes sure they look as good
as possible. At $14, the DVD edition of Taxi Driver currently available is a gift
from the film gods. You get a clean print of the film that has been mastered to very high
standards, which should be enough. But the extras are a feast. First is a riveting,
71-minute "making-of" feature that includes extensive interviews with Scorsese,
De Niro, Foster, Cybill Shepherd, and Albert Brooks. Cinematographer Michael Chapman
shows in detail how he got the tracking shot toward the end of the film, and the wild
makeup man Dick Smith tells how he got those realistic scenes of gore back before CGI.
Another feature lets you leave the film and go to the same point in Schrader’s
script, then resume the film. It’s seamless, and a great education for aspiring film
writers. Scorsese storyboards every scene in every one of his films, and all of his
storyboards for Taxi Driver are included here. It’s a long peek into the mind
of an impressive artist. The only thing missing would be a film score-only track so that
we could better appreciate the illuminating work of the legendary composer Bernard
Herrmann, who died the final night of recording the score.
Artists hope to enlighten. What finally cements Taxi
Driver’s importance is that we all walk past a Travis Bickle every day -- people
on the street who are downtrodden, outcast, mentally off-kilter. It’s as Bickle says:
"Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks,
stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man." Where
others might scream or cry these words, Bickle is so beaten down that he can muster only a
little outrage. Sympathy, forgiveness, tolerance, and love are
words that would never occur to him.
Anywhere there is a young man who feels like Travis Bickle,
there is a ticking time bomb, whether he’s a terrorist or a high school kid with a
gun. You stop insanity by first understanding it, then acting on that understanding. Taxi
Driver helps us understand.
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
