One for the Lonely... Scorsese's brilliantly subversive account of God's Lonely Man in NYC

Rating: 10/10 (6 May 2011)

A few years back, as i perused the aisles of HMV for quality DVDs, I encountered the two-disc special edition of Taxi Driver which i didn't then own. On it's sheath was a sticker reading 'One for the Lads'. At first I was disgusted -how could the same people who signify a social realism drama in their Sky Movies Guide with the image of sketch character Vicky Pollard go so far as to spit their heathen phlegm upon the facade of one of the finest films ever made? Recently, I have looked more positively upon their congealed phlegm and realised that they had it right: Taxi Driver certainly ain't one for the lasses. After all, do women really unleash their hatred upon people who've never affected them? Are women ever the ones pulling the triggers behind the American high school massacres. No. I believe HMV really nailed male psychology on that one. Well done, guys!
Anyhow, on with the review... Travis Bickle is sick of "the days go(ing) on and on with regularity" in his cab and wants to "become a person like other people". This means picking up another not-quite-so-lonely heart in the form of angelic campaign worker Betsy and taking her out to see a porno for a first date. When she surprisingly walks out on him and hails a cab ride home (a real arrow in the heart for any cabbie), he is astonished. Bickle's emotional dysfunction is also evident in the banal conversations he has with his fellow cabbies at their Belmore Cafeteria hangout. He's someone who never quite belonged, probably feeling even more distant upon his return from military service in Nam , or "f*ckin' Mau Mau land" as father figure and fellow disenchanted cabbie Wizard calls it.
"You get a job. You become the job," Wizard tells him after Travis cryptically expresses his fear that his repressed urges to kill as he did in Vietnam will explode sometime soon. Travis Bickle is a Taxi Driver, more than a son, a brother, an ex-boyfriend or anything else. His life rotates around his twelve-hour shifts and inability to sleep. Director Scorsese plays the 'Man in Cab' or herald of things to come who maniacally describes what he will do to an ex-girlfriend's pudenda with a 44. Magnum. The scene that follows is a brilliantly subjective one in which Travis heads to the Belmore Cafeteria for the aforementioned useless advice he receives from Peter Boyle's Wizard character. It is shot in such a tense way, as with the rest of the movie from TB's perspective, as to evoke a feeling of imminent violence. In other words, the quick cuts and tight shots of ticket dispensers and slo-mo hacky looks of Travis suggest he is gonna unload his inner demons right there in the cafeteria.
Of course, he doesn't start killing people midway through the movie, but canny soon he's buying guns and ammo from seedy street dealers in grimy hotel rooms and getting the infamous Mohawk haircut as he plots his revenge on a world which never quite accepted him like it did the Senator Palantines or corner pimps like Matthew (aka 'Sport'). His is not simply a mission of vengeance though, as he aims to rescue 12-and -a-half prostitute Iris from the clutches of her loving-but-business-minded manager Sport. In the end, our homicidal protagonist is dubbed a hero by the media, or is it just his dying fantasy?
The debate over whether Travis actually succeeds in killing himself along with all of his victims rages on. Certainly the ending in which an expressionless Betsy is escorted home by an apparently unchanged Travis is very ethereal and would seem the perfectly unimaginative wordless fantasy of a dying loner like Bickle. The tracking shot from the blood-drenched stairwell into the street would even suggest the departure of Travis's soul, but the attention to detail on the newspapers and the filmmaker's own comments would suggest the opposite.
A sequel following a 21st century Bickle around a Giulianian post-9/11 New York is supposedly in the works. One can only imagine Travis being diagnosed as Autistic and being assigned a carer who he becomes obsessed with, but goes on a rampage against the PC hordes and capitalist demagogues in Manhattan when she rejects him. Perhaps the climactic shootout will occur on the steps of Wall Street where Bickle takes out his aggression upon the demon bankers who he blames for the loss of his job. Maybe he'll get a mullet this time. Or he could just get a facebook account and p*ss away his solitary existence there. Whatever they decide to do, it'll be interesting to see the patron Saint of Loneliness return...