Spirit of the Age

Rating: 10/10 (26 October 2012)

There are movies which seem to sum up the spirit of an age, and "Taxi Driver" is probably the one which best captures the spirit of America during the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate Ford administration of the mid-seventies. The main character, Travis Bickle, a New York taxi driver, is also a former U.S. Marine; the film never explicitly states that he served in Vietnam, but seventies audiences would probably have inferred this from the date of his honourable discharge (1973).
In the seventies New York was widely seen as a dirty, economically depressed, crime-ridden city, and this reflected in the film. Indeed, the state of America as a whole is little better. A Presidential candidate, Senator Charles Palantine, is campaigning in the city and, while he claims to offer a message of hope, his speeches paint a picture of a nation depressed by war, corruption, crime, unemployment and inflation.
Travis is a strange, contradictory character. Unable to adapt to civilian life, he suffers from insomnia and depression, and has few friends. Most of his spare time is spent writing in his diary or watching pornographic films. He meets an attractive young woman named Betsy, one of Palantine's campaign volunteers, and persuades her to go out with him, but she dumps him when he takes her to see a blue movie on their second date. Despite his liking for pornography, however, he is something of a moralist, disgusted by the petty crime, drug addiction and prostitution that he witnesses on his journeys and becomes obsessed with the idea of doing something to "clean the city up" or to make himself famous. His first thought is to assassinate Palantine, not out of any political motive- he has no interest in Palantine's policies or politics in general- but to get revenge on Betsy for dumping him. He abandons this idea, however, when he realises that the senator's bodyguards suspect him, and forms a plan to rescue Iris, a twelve-year- old prostitute, from her pimp and from her life of vice.
"The Godfather Part II" had made Robert De Niro one of the most exciting film stars of the seventies. "Taxi Driver" was the second film in his long collaboration with Martin Scorsese (the first was "Mean Streets"), and his spellbinding performance here is perhaps even better than "Godfather II". Travis is not the hero of the film- this is a film without heroes- but its anti-hero. He is, ironically, hailed as a hero after he succeeds in freeing Iris in a violent shootout, but he could easily have become an assassin, reviled as another Lee Harvey Oswald. And yet, De Niro enables us, if not to sympathise with him, at least to understand his frustrations and the dark psychological compulsions which drive him. He is a man who has served his country honourably, yet who seems to have been abandoned by that country on his return to civilian life.
The other remarkable performance in the film comes from Jodie Foster. Iris may be a victim, of her pimp and of the men who use her for sex, but in Foster's portrayal Iris is a girl desperately trying to pretend that she is not a victim, but rather a cool, sophisticated young woman capable of making her own moral choices. Foster was only 13, but here she gives a clear indication of the great actress she was to become in the late eighties and nineties. There are also good contributions from Harvey Keitel as the pimp and Cybill Shepherd as Betsy, a genteel middle-class girl who is first fascinated by Travis, then repelled by him.
De Niro was nominated for a "Best Actor" Oscar, but lost to another great performance, Peter Finch's in "Network". Bernard Herrmann should have won "Best Musical Score" for his melancholy, jazz-based music with its plangent saxophone which fits the film's mood perfectly. Like Finch's this would have been a posthumous Oscar, as this was Herrmann's last film score and he died shortly after completing it. In my view the film itself should have won the "Best Picture" award for 1976, but in the event it proved to be too controversial for the Academy, which often prefers the sentimental to the challenging. I could have understood "Taxi Driver" losing to something like "Network" or Don Siegel's "The Shootist", both excellent films in their own right, but losing to "Rocky"..?
What really baffled me was that there was no "Best Director" nomination for Scorsese. Admittedly, he has never been a favourite of the Academy, but this is a superbly directed film. Scorsese is particularly skilled at finding memorable images, notably those of Travis's cab on its journeys through the steamy night-time city. (The film was shot during a summer heatwave). These scenes are dominated by images of dirt and corruption, contrasting with the tawdry glitter of the neon lights and images of water, in the form of rain, of sprays from the fire hydrants or what Roger Ebert described as "stygian clouds of steam". Another remarkably effective sequence is the final shoot-out in which Travis takes on Iris's pimp and his associates. The film may have influenced Lawrence Kasdan's "Body Heat" from a few years later, another film set during a heatwave and which uses a jazz score reminiscent of Herrmann's.
The intelligent and literate script was written by Paul Schrader, later to become a director in his own right; a number of Schrader's other films, such as "American Gigolo" have a self-centred loner as their main character. "Taxi Driver" is one of the greatest films of the seventies, one of those rare films where script, direction, photography, acting and music all combine to produce something of rare quality. 10/10