Upon watching TAXI DRIVER, there’s one worry I have in my mind about Travis Bickle, the inconceivable protagonist in the film, whether what kind of bloodshed masterpiece he’s going to cause at the movie’s closing bow. Misunderstood by his surroundings, it doesn’t take a leap of genius to completely comprehend the character of Bickle. We just have to look around him – the dark, mean streets of New York, the prostitutes, the junkies, the mess, the racism, and frustration of his humanity – in social context, he’s angry about the world, and most of all, angry about himself, leading him to self-destruction that he couldn’t fully control. What a great film this TAXI DRIVER, a classic interpretation of Martin Scorcese back in the 70s, about the madness of violence, and the violence of madness.


When we ride the TAXI DRIVER, we see the driver straight. We don’t see him fully but we see him through a broken light in the rear-view mirror. Just as the understanding for this Travis Bickle (a scarily magnificent performance by Robert de Niro); one glance, he looks pretty normal, but within the cauldron of his thoughts and the calculating looks of his eyes, as his belligerent neighbourhood of New York lays sprawling in chaos in his sight, there’s a passive gesture of paranoia. Coming out as a veteran from the ‘Nam War, and comes out rejected by a beautiful blonde bombshell that works in a political campaign office (because he took her to watch a “dirty film” he believed to be normal for couples to see in New York – there’s a social class comment here), his frustration builds up, either sexually, emotionally, or socially, that the more he gets in touch with the atmosphere he move about, the more he moves to the ignominy of violence. As he confesses with lack of hope “...there’s something bad going on in my mind, and I don’t know how to deal with it,” Bickle represses this angst but was soon reinforced when he meets the 12-year old prostitute shockingly portrayed by the then very young Jodie Foster, with creepy accuracy and tinged with precise 13-going-on-30 behaviour. Bickle sees the hope in the young prostitute, and that she could still set her wings free, and turns out as well that as he was saving her, he realised she was also his saving grace.


In one of the most unforgettable moments of the film, Bickle pulls out all his angry emotions, his craving to kill, to get his guns, cause a bloodbath, to save one child from the chains of cultural and social misdemeanours. We can ask ourselves at the end, is Bickle a hero or a victim of the rejection of the community? To be honest, he’s both. He’s a man who suffered in loneliness, and violence was his solution to his suffering.


Martin Scorcese directs this haunting portrayal of New York and this odyssey of a man in search for his lost soul, and he did a fantastic job of making TAXI DRIVER feel like it’s real and most believably so, a social commentary that has the impact to give people a good rollicking.



VERDICT:

The stunning Robert de Niro and shocking Jodie Foster are at the top of their class with TAXI DRIVER. It’s shuns cinematic idiosyncrasy and gives us a realistic portrayal of the embittered humanity. While considered a classic, it’s the character of Travis Bickle that stays so relentlessly, an icon to all the misunderstood misfits in the world.


RATING: A