No Sympathy

Rating: Null/10 (25 November 2004)

This film is memorable and is always a compelling piece of film-making. It offers a realistic view as the urban environment as the ultimate alien environment to a person who is incapable of connecting to other people. At the beginning of the film, we have sympathy for Travis. His thwarted efforts at trying to have a conversation with the woman who works behind the candy-counter in the porn theatre is pathetic. When Travis takes Betsy for coffee, we see him doing his best at getting the relationship off to a good start. We see a man who doesn't know the "games" that people often play in interpersonal encounters, and we are hoping that he gets a second chance with Betsy. But when he does, that's when our sympathies dissolve for Travis, and we realize how out-of-touch he is, how utterly socially inept he is. For the obvious reason that he takes this beautiful and educated woman to a sex film. How unaware and tasteless can a man be? Why should we feel sorry for Travis when his subsequent efforts to try to et back together with Betsy go rebuffed? From then on, we don't have a film about loneliness as the film claims to be, but a film about descent into madness. Travis becomes a comic-book character, who is acting in his own movie, albeit as either a cowboy or an Indian. Travis becomes an Action-Hero suffused with anomie. He becomes a socio-pathetic warrior in search of an enemy. His intentions with Iris are noble, but the means of execution are criminal. He becomes more violent and misanthropic than any of the sleazy characters he disdains.