gritty realism powerful performances but a possible fantasy ending!

Rating: Null/10 (19 November 2005)

"Taxi Driver" is one of the very rare films that caught my attention with powerful performances and dark gritty realism. Even though I don't know the feeling of living in a city which has a dark seedy--at least visible-- side I can say it is not a typical American flick. You do not see a hero who kills bad men and achieves something good in the world of wickedness! You do not see just action which may be pretty goony in any film. You do not see just philosophical inner monologues but you feel you are just involved the story of Travis. Travis is an alienated guy who tries to comes to grip with the socially disoriented world around himself. He suffers from insomnia and consequently takes a job as taxi driver and volunteers to work the overnight shift "anytime, anywhere". Travis spends his spare time watching pornography in seedy theaters and driving around aimlessly through the darkest and most repulsive neighborhoods of Manhattan.While he just drives through these detestable neighborhoods of the town we witness the seedy side of the town and we feel the struggle of a frustrated lonely guy against the cold and distant world. The only thing that the movie lacks is the ambiguity of its ending. Roger Ebert has written of the film's ending, "There has been much discussion about the ending, in which we see newspaper clippings about Travis's 'heroism', and then Betsy gets into his cab and seems to give him admiration instead of her earlier disgust. Is this a fantasy scene? Did Travis survive the shoot-out? Are we experiencing his dying thoughts? Can the sequence be accepted as literally true? ... I am not sure there can be an answer to these questions. The end sequence plays like music, not drama: It completes the story on an emotional, not a literal, level. We end not on carnage but on redemption, which is the goal of so many of Scorsese's characters."
I am not sure it is practically true either. In that way it reminded me Barton Fink which sounded like a sophisticated joke to me when it ended coz I had not figured out which part was fantasy which part was reality. Watch and decide I would say!