Great

Rating: 10/10 (1 September 2010)

Is there an American film more wrongly and regularly misinterpreted than Martin Scorsese's 1976 masterpiece, Taxi Driver? Not even 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick, nor Apocalypse Now, by Francis Ford Coppola, have been intellectually, politically, and critically twisted and turned away from what they really are- and this all aside and apart from the silly debates over art influencing real world violence after John W. Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, in 1981, due to his own obsession with actress Jodie Foster. The film has been deconstructed and reconstructed (see references to Death Wish and The Searchers) according to prevailing political and artistic whims more than several times, and matters have been further complicated by the many claims of the film's protagonists, from screenwriter Paul Schrader (is there a better example of a filmic one hit wonder?), to director Scorsese, to star Robert De Niro, the claims and counterclaims about the film have devolved into legendry.
Taxi Driver was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, but lost out to the formulaic boxer flick, Rocky, penned by Sylvester Stallone It did, however, win the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It is not only a great motion picture, but it is one of the best portraits of a character ever filmed, and Travis Bickle is one of the scariest characters in film history. Probably only Martin Landau's character, Judah Rosenthal, in Woody Allen's Crimes And Misdemeanors, is more truly horrifying (and certainly far more evil). But Bickle is every bit as scary, for he is far more unpredictable to those about him. Yes, he is not a cold blooded murderer, like Rosenthal, but he is certainly violent, and a racist- not of the KKK White Supremacist sort, but of the passive, scared little white boy sort; and much mileage has been gotten from the fact that the film's final shootout victims were all white, when in the original screenplay they had been all black (Scorsese and Schrader bowed to studio pressure to change that fact, because by not making a change, the beancounters claimed, the film might incite race riots, and lead to financial culpability). These elements are what make Bickle scary, and why he is so realistically portrayed. Yet, there is also the niggling truth even the film seems loath to admit, that Travis Bickle really and truly IS a hero, and not merely a crazed lunatic. Note that I wrote 'not merely,' for this is an important point: because most critics resort to binary thought in such matters, that does not change the fact that Bickle is a dangerous and paranoid man and a hero; and these are not mutually opposing claims. And by 'hero,' I mean it in the absolutely most sober sense of the word. Heroes are not perfect men, but they are real men (and women, of course). And heroes are not necessarily even ethically 'good' men (imagine that!). But they are brave, they are determined, and they are relentless, in the pursuit of the goals, things, and people, they deem as good. But, most of all they are 'real,' not like the fictive heroes that populate books and films, comic books and video games. And rarely has there ever been a more chillingly realistic portrayal of a hero in film than Travis Bickle. Now, do me the favor of not misinterpreting that, OK?