Why This Film is a Classic is a Profound Mystery

Rating: 1/10 (18 June 2013)

Martin Scorsese is one of those directors whose work I just don't seem to get. His films are not totally inaccessible, like most of the work of Stanley Kubrick, but sitting through a Scorsese production is often an exercise that pendulums back and forth between crashing boredom and utter incomprehensibility.
Of course, everyone knows by now that TAXI DRIVER is about isolation. Specifically the isolation of one man in the midst of a bustling city. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a Viet Nam veteran, applies for a job driving a taxi in New York on the graveyard shift; the reason he gives for wanting the job is that he does not sleep at night. That anyone would hire him to actually drive a vehicle under those conditions seems odd, but then everything about Bickle is odd. Clearly he suffers from a profound sense of isolation, but most of that is of his own making, since when it comes to social interaction this guy is so clueless that he makes burnout Reverend Jim from the television show "Taxi" seem like Albert Einstein by comparison.
Travis finds himself attracted to Betsy, a woman working on the presidential campaign of a politician (Cybill Shepherd, proving yet again that she cannot act her way out of a cream puff factory), and he has sufficient social skills to get her to agree to a movie date. Then he takes her to a XXX porn film. Of course she cannot get out of there fast enough, and he is totally bewildered; in his mind it was a perfect date movie.
A good deal of the story is told via Travis's inner thoughts, spoken by De Niro on the soundtrack. This device was old even in 1976, and there is too much of it; the audience is already alienated from this man, and having his thoughts overdubbed places him even farther from anything remotely approaching understanding.
Possibly the best scenes in the movie are the ones with Jodie Foster as Iris, a twelve-year-old prostitute whom Travis attempts to rescue from what he sees as a sordid life. Iris is possibly the most interesting person in the film; Foster plays her as a girl walking a tightrope between what she has to do to survive and the necessity to avoid danger; she is receptive to Travis at first, but even a twelve-year-old can see that this guy is not playing with a full deck. And at least she breathes some life into an unbearably tedious movie.
Which brings us to De Niro. He's good here, but he's much better elsewhere; watching him I had the impression that Scorsese went to one of two extremes: either he gave the actor no direction at all and let him do as he pleased, or he micromanaged every nuance of the character and in the process sucked the life out of it. Whatever, the result is a stilted and peculiar bit of acting that seems beneath a major talent like De Niro. Yes, we get Travis's isolation, but we never know what caused it, or why he is just so damn WEIRD.
And of course, as is Scorsese's habit, all of this is presented under the guise of "gritty reality" (think GOODFELLAS and RAGING BULL, both of which ram "gritty reality" down the viewer's throat until the urge to run screaming from the theater is almost overwhelming).
I am a native of New York City; I was born there and lived there until I was forty-two. Martin Scorsese is also a native of the City, but I do not recognize the picture of NYC he paints in this film at all. The simple answer is that we are seeing the City through Travis Bickle's eyes, but while he describes what he sees, we never find out WHY he sees things the way he does; it is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of a very frustrating film.
Great film? Depends on which critic you ask. The late Roger Ebert loved it. Leonard Maltin thinks it's awful. I suspect that, like most of Scorsese's oeuvre, this is one of those movies you either love or you hate. Well, I didn't exactly HATE it, but most of it is insufferably boring. De Niro presents us with a wacko character but fails to provide a provenance for his behavior. About the only good thing I can say about Cybill Shepherd is that her role is brief; she's absolutely PAINFUL to watch. It is only Jodie Foster, all of twelve years old yet wearing an ancient expression in her eyes that tells the story of where this girl has been, that draws and holds the audience's attention; honestly, without Foster the film would have no life at all.
And possibly the worst of it is that Bickle's increasing descent into violence is left totally unexplained. It would be easy to assume that it was his Viet Nam service that unhinged him, but the movie does not play that way and at any rate if that were the case it would have been an easy matter to communicate it. To put it in five short words, this film is a mess.