Creeping Madness

Rating: 8/10 (25 March 2012)

A comparatively youthful Robert DeNiro plays lead in the role that might be said to have 'made' him.
He is Travis Bickle, a former Vietnam marine turned misfit. Unable to sleep, he resorts to nocturnal taxi-driving in New York. As a character in decline, he is almost a classic example and maybe even voice for all of those similar loners who gradually lapse into psychosis, only to impact upon public consciousness when they decide to correct what's wrong in the world instead of what's wrong in their heads.
Bickle has all of the symptoms. He lives in squalor, he's obsessed with physical fitness, he's a gun-freak, he can't make it with women, and all he sees is depravity. But he has a Walter Mitty complex, with preposterous fantasies about himself and some personal destiny for which fate is grooming him. A week never seems to pass when we don't read about just such a case in the papers, with all of the tragic consequences.
Much of the movie is inevitably filmed at night with harsh contrasts of darkness and artificial illumination. People and places are imperfectly seen. Sometimes just a flash of expression or a vignette of drama is all we glimpse and must infer the rest, even as Travis Bickle does. Scorsese has worked hard to present nocturnal New York as a sort of hell-on-earth, a breeding-ground for anger, resentment, disappointment and distempered fantasy. Though it's really no different from most major cities today.
Like so many people of his stamp, Bickle accumulates an arsenal of guns. At one point, whilst shopping, he interrupts a robbery and shoots - perhaps fatally - the young black culprit. We never know. He departs leaving the furious shop-keeper beating the prostrate robber's body with a baseball bat.
At last, in an attempt to 'be somebody' he attempts to rescue a young whore. In the course of it he takes his arsenal and enters the tenement brothel. Without ceremony he begins shooting. It's violent and bloody.
But Scorsese clumsily attempts to rescue the fat from the fire. Towards the end, we see a series of newspaper cuttings in which the media have depicted Bickle as some 'hero', engaged in a shoot-out with mobsters. Finally, we encounter him in his cab once more, seemingly balanced and peaceable. It's a highly implausible caricature. The media have often shown themselves to be very quick at pre-judging heroes and villains, but truth eventually comes out. The police could hardly have failed to determine from his handprints on the discarded (and unlicensed) firearms as well as the various holsters and knife-sheath on his person, that they were dealing with a vigilante. The young hooker may have spoken in his favour, but the evidence would've made it pretty clear that he went to the premises tooled-up for serious trouble. As the girl was still a minor, he could and should have just called the police.
It's still a very engaging analysis of an outsider on the skids even so.