Urban Anomi.

Rating: 8/10 (29 March 2009)

A truly disturbing movie. Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), great name, falls into a mood of brooding, amorphous rage and is frustrated in his attempts to murder a politician. So he wipes out a couple of low-life pimps instead.
The story tracks him through his descent into insanity. Interesting folks are encountered along the way but have less impact than rubber bumpers have on a pinball. Cybill Shepherd and Peter Boyle, for instance. Boyle is one of a handful of taxi drivers, like DeNiro, who gather at a certain café to shoot the breeze on breaks. He's particularly funny in his working-class disinclination to think things through. "Them queers" have to get married and divorced in California, he says wonderingly. I saw this in the Castro Theater in San Francisco and the audience erupted in laughter. When DeNiro asks for advice and gets nonsense in response, Boyle asks, "What do you want, Bertrand Russell?"
The film is unusual for Martin Scorsese. His most successful work has been with solidary groups, like small time hoods and the Mafia, in which there is an agreed-upon set of rules, and everyone knows everyone else. This one digs into urban anomie. "Anomi" is a concept developed by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim and it means, essentially, "without rules." It's the kind of thing you experience when you drive into a vast strip mall parking lot and all the yellow lines guiding traffic have been erased. What do I do NOW, Ma?
Scorsese is examining a social world that, as an Italian Catholic, he really has had little contact with. The film was written by Paul Schrader who, as an ex-Calvinist, is a little more familiar with this sort of ontological anxiety. It crops up in the production design. When DeNiro makes his unfulfilling meeting with Jody Foster, the twelve-year-old whore, it collapses in misunderstanding but in the background there are a multitude of Catholic candles. The climactic scene has a voice reading a letter to DeNiro from Foster's square Midwestern parents, congratulating him for an act that was ancillary to his own agenda, which was evidently to bring the world down around his ears.
A film of the 1970s, it resonates less with audiences today. The racial troubles that were so headline-grabbing at the time show up less often in the news today. Not that the problem of race is solved, but the categorical thinking that divided us into two warring tribes has less relevance. The resentment simmers but has been cut off at the ankles, partly by our recent election of an African-American to the highest office in the nation. At the same time we have to admit that, as a nation, we are pustular with hatred for each other and for other countries that may not behave the way we want them to. Our leading presidential candidate has made it clear that he will go to war with Iran if Iran doesn't give up its nuclear ambitions. These attitudes come from the same place as Travis Bickle's.
Most powerful shot in the movie: the camera slowly moves in on a bubbling glass of Alka Seltzer on the table in front of Robert DeNiro. All that fizzing is but one step removed from the explosion that is to follow.