Take a trip with Travis

Rating: 8/10 (31 March 2009)

Don Quixote got crazy after too much reading and too little sleeping...
Martin Scorsese takes us on a trip around New York City in a yellow cab driven by Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a Vietnam veteran who, due to his lack of sleep, decides to work also during the night. He falls in love with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a campaign worker with whom he shall attempt to go out. But the world Betsy and the presidential candidate she works for live in does not coincide with the one Travis sees from his taxi every night: that other world, shown to us through Travis's eyes and through the eyes of the taxi he drives, is one inhabited by people like Iris (Jodie Foster), a too-young prostitute whom he will try to rescue from her ponce 'Sport' Matthew (Harvey Keitel).
'Taxi Driver' is not a film about the night in the big city, in spite of its showing the apparently hidden reality that remains behind the curtains of neon and light. We follow Travis on his working trips and also during his resting time, when he finds entertainment seeing pornographic films. 'Taxi Driver' is about someone who cannot confront reality.
Night-shift taxi drivers and prostitutes: two figures that maintain a close and strong relationship all over the world. Business-like, for sure, although Travis does not know what to do with the money he gets from Sport. In fact, Travis spends a lot of money on buying an arsenal, and a great deal of time on body building.
It is not difficult to think of Travis as a mentally ill person. What is really difficult is to allow the spectator to understand how a mind can go through the downhill process of mental catastrophe, and yet that mind be desperately seeking relieve. What rather than who drives that taxi? Is it only the consequence of the Vietnam experience? Is it disgust, racism, or a pitiful feeling of not belonging to anyone, of not being loved by anyone? The frequent nocturnal sequences of the film acquire a nightmarish dimension not only by means of the appearance of the prototypical smog of New York City but also by the use of subjective and over-the-shoulder shots of both the driver and his taxi. "The job becomes the man," says one of his work mates, the only Sancho Panza he meets. Travis, travel, taxi, taxi driver: the name becomes the title, the title becomes the film.
The seminal work of John Ford in 'The Searchers' and 'Fort Apache', for instance, with both John Wayne in the former film and Henry Fonda in the latter performing functional roles not too dissimilar from the one represented by De Niro in this film, shows us heroes(?) who may seem necessary to many but with whom few people would like to live. The main difference between Ford and Scorsese does not lie in the place, neither in the genre'Taxi Driver' can be plainly read as a late western, with the people of the night as the Native Americans, as the others, nor in the historical moment they date their stories, but in the state the spectator is left in by each director. Ford leaves us wondering about the reason-ability of his main characters, Scorsese lets us enter the mind of Travis as the privileged passengers who will never forget the experience of having taken a trip with Travis. Perhaps we shall not want to remember that we have been in that taxi. Perhaps we may prefer to think that it was only a dream, only a film.
José Díaz-Cuesta