TAXI DRIVER: 20th Anniversary Edition

Date of publication: 03/01/1996

By Roger Ebert

Are you talkin' to me? Well, I'm the only one here.

Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver" It is the last line, "Well, I'm the only one here," that never gets quoted. It is the truest line in the film. Travis Bickle exists in "Taxi Driver" as a character with a desperate need to make some kind of contact somehow - to share or mimic the effortless social interaction he sees all around him, but does not participate in.

The film can be seen as a series of his failed attempts to connect, every one of them hopelessly wrong. Bickle (Robert De Niro) asks a girl out on a date and takes her to a porno movie. He sucks up to a political candidate and ends by alarming him. He tries to make small talk with a Secret Service agent. He wants to befriend a child prostitute, but scares her away. He is so lonely that when he asks, "Who you talkin' to?" he is addressing himself in a mirror.

This utter aloneness is at the center of "Taxi Driver," one of the best and most powerful of all films, and perhaps it is why so many people connect with it even though Travis Bickle would seem to be the most alienating of movie heroes. We have all felt as alone as Travis. Most of us are better at dealing with it.

Martin Scorsese's 1976 film, which is now being re-released in a restored color print, with a stereophonic version of the Bernard Herrmann score, is a film that does not grow dated, or overfamiliar. I have seen it dozens of times. Each time I see it, it works; I am drawn into Travis' underworld of alienation, loneliness, haplessness and anger.

It is a widely known item of cinematic lore that Paul Schrader's screenplay for "Taxi Driver" was inspired by "The Searchers," John Ford's 1956 film. In both films, the heroes grow obsessed with "rescuing" women who may not, in fact, want to be rescued. They are like the proverbial Boy Scout who helps the little old lady across the street whether or not she wants to go.

"The Searchers" has Civil War veteran John Wayne devoting years of his life to the search for his young niece Debbie (Natalie Wood), who has been kidnapped by Commanches. The thought of her in the arms of an Indian grinds away at him. When he finally finds her, she tells him the Indians are her people now and runs away. Wayne then plans to kill the girl, for the crime of having become a "squaw." But at the end, finally capturing her, he lifts her up (in a famous shot) and says, "Let's go home, Debbie."

The dynamic here is that Wayne has forgiven his niece, after having participated in the killing of the people who, for 15 years or so, had been her family. As the movie ends, the niece is reunited with her surviving biological family, and the last shot shows Wayne silhouetted in a doorway, drawn once again to the wide open spaces. There is, significantly, no scene showing us how the niece feels about what has happened to her.

In "Taxi Driver," Travis Bickle is also a war veteran, horribly scarred in Vietnam. He encounters a 12-year-old prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster), controlled by a pimp named Sport (Harvey Keitel). Sport wears an Indian headband. Travis determines to "rescue" Iris, and does so, in a bloodbath that is unsurpassed even in the films of Scorsese. A letter and clippings from the Steensmans, Iris' parents, thank him for saving their girl. But a crucial earlier scene between Iris and Sport suggests that she was content to be with him, and the reasons why she ran away from home are not explored.

The buried message of both films is that an alienated man, unable to establish normal relationships, becomes a loner and wanderer, and assigns himself to rescue an innocent young girl from a life that offends his prejudices. In "Taxi Driver," this central story is surrounded by many smaller ones, all building to the same theme. The story takes place during a political campaign, and Travis twice finds himself with the candidate, Palatine, in his cab: Once, the candidate is with a hooker; the next time, with campaign aides. Travis goes through the motions of ingratiating flattery on the second occasion, but we, and Palatine, sense something wrong.

Shortly after that Travis tries to "free" one of Palatine's campaign workers, a blond he has idealized (Cybill Shepherd). That goes wrong with the porno movie. And then, after the fearsome rehearsal in the mirror, he becomes a walking arsenal and goes to assassinate Palatine. The Palatine scenes are like dress rehearsals for the ending of the film. With both Betsy (Shepherd) and Iris, he has a friendly conversation in a coffee shop, followed by an aborted "date," followed by attacks on the men he perceives as controlling them; he tries unsuccessfully to assassinate Palatine and then goes gunning for Sport.

There are undercurrents in the film that you sense without quite putting your finger on them. Travis' implied feelings about blacks, for example, which emerge in two long shots in a taxi driver's hangout, when he exchanges looks with a man who may be a drug dealer. His ambivalent feelings about sex (he lives in a world of pornography, but the sexual activity he observes in the city fills him with loathing). His hatred for the city, inhabited by "scum." His preference for working at night, and the way cinematographer Michael Chapman makes the yellow cab into a vessel by which Travis journeys the underworld, as steam escapes from vents in the streets, and the cab splashes through water from hydrants - a Stygian passage.

What is the purpose, the use, of a film like "Taxi Driver"? It is not simply a seamy, violent portrait of a sick man in a disgusting world. Such a portrait it is, yes, but not "simply." It takes us inside the mind of an alienated fringe person like those who have so profoundly changed the course of recent history (Oswald, Ray, Bremer, Chapman). It helps us to understand these creatures who emerge, every so often, guns in their hands, enforcing the death penalty for the crime of celebrity. Sick as he is, Travis is a man. And no man is an island.

  TAXI DRIVER: 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION (STAR) (STAR) (STAR) (STAR)
   Travis Bickle    Robert De Niro
   Iris    Jodie Foster
   Sport    Harvey Keitel
   Tom    Albert Brooks
   Wizard    Peter Boyle
   A restored film directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Paul
  Schrader. Running time: 112 minutes. Classified R (for violence and
  profanity). Opening today at the Music Box.









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