A Truly Mysterious Noir

Rating: 10/10 (5 November 2006)

This truly mysterious film is not about a city but about the endurance of Travis' soul, and out of all New York he pegs only those details that sustain and bolster his fixations. He is an ex- Marine, Vietnam vet, composer of conscientious anniversary letters to his parents, taxi driver, killer. The movie seldom digresses terribly far off from the exclusive, deeply abstract manner in which he views the city and lets it traumatize him.
It's a place, first of all, occupied by women he cannot have: unapproachable blonde women who might find him attractive for a second, who might join him for coffee, but who ultimately will have to shake their heads and sigh, "Oh, Travis!" because they find him odd. And then, even more inhumanly, the city seems colonized by men who can have these women, men ranging from clowning political hacks to street-corner pimps who, all the same, have in common the mystical aptitude to address a woman without getting everything wrong.
Travis Bickle is an old-fashioned romantic at heart, but he settles for the lowest common denominator of diversion when he can't sleep because of how small his sociopathic mind is. He follows no political issues, music, movies, not much except his job. He could on paper look for fares anywhere in the city, but he's invariably carried back to 42nd Street, to Times Square and the whores, street freaks, and porno houses. It's here that an ugly kind of sex comes closest to the external, the sex of buying, selling, and using people. Travis isn't into that, he hates it, but Times Square nurtures his rage. His sexual frustration is focalized into a loathing for the dregs he consumingly scrutinizes. He tries to violate the repetition.
There is a masterfully melancholy scene so painful that camera pans away into a doorway. It's as if we can't stand to watch Travis feel the grief of being rejected. This is fascinating, because later, when Travis goes on a murder spree, the camera goes so far as to assume slow motion so we can see every nuance of the violence.
That Scorsese finds the rejection more disturbing than the murders is compelling, because it helps to clarify Travis Bickle, and maybe it goes to some degree toward defining one variation of urban violence. Travis has been ostracized so methodically, so frequently, from a piece of the action that ultimately he has to hit back in some such way.
Scorsese's distinctive noir doesn't disclose more than a decent fraction of what we want to know, even through the narration of Travis himself keeping a diary, because his diary is given in present-tense. We're not told where Travis comes from, what his particular issues are, because this isn't an investigation, but a vignette of some days in his life. We don't know the niceties of Travis's abstractions, but in an eerie sense we know what we need to know of him. The film's a masterpiece of evocative character study. Scorsese's techniques sorts out fine points that suggest feelings, and that's the result he wants. The performances are both strange and realistic: He goes for moments from his actors, rather than slowly developed characters. It's as if the required emotions were written in the margins of their scripts: Give me anger, fear, dread.
Robert De Niro, as Travis Bickle, evokes despondency, agitation and passion while totally maintaining mystique, and in many of his close-ups, Scorsese employs slow motion virtually below the threshold of our consciousness to prolong the foreshadowing and manifestation. Cybill Shepherd, as the blonde beauty, is an iceberg languidly retreating into sympathy. And there's Jodie Foster, shockingly cast as a twelve-year-old prostitute whom Travis wants to "save." Harvey Keitel, a veteran of Scorsese's earliest work, is the pimp who manipulates her, and he evokes the sure brand of severity that's all subterfuge.
These people are introduced essentially in very brief moments, like smoky shadows forebode to utterly eclipse them. This cinematic shard of steel, to which John Hinckley's subsequent actions were frankly a testament, is a hell, saturated in Bernard Herrmann's fluidly disillusioned score, from the opening shot of a cab emanating from dark, gloomy veils of apparent overcast to the climactic killing scene in which the camera ultimately looks straight down.