Time out of time?

Rating: 7/10 (15 June 2010)

A striking film. I didn't see this film until last night, more than 25 years after it was made. Generally I don't like the Scorsese/Tarantino adulation of gangster psychopathology, if only because it explains little and probably serves best to give timid males some relief from their anxieties. If their films point a moral, it is that people do what has been done unto them, which is a pretty obvious truism that doesn't require slaughter-house emphasis.
But what makes this particular film so disturbing? Surprisingly, I think it is the music, the whole lounge jazz idiom. Some call Taxi Driver a film noir. It is not - it's way too seedy. But it has the score of a film noir. In other words, Taxi Driver is a forties/fifties film set in the seventies. Strictly, the score should include bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, but not the Stones (too hedonistic), but more likely urban rock like Springsteen (for the self-pity). It would have made a more informative film: for instance, how afraid of himself is this character?
In a way, Scorsese is here like Bogdanovich and Polanski, cultural outsiders making stylistic tributes to a more authentic cinematic tradition. Only the likes of Dick Richards' Farewell My Lovely really worked, but they were still in that tradition.
The great surprise for me in Taxi Driver is the relative humanity of de Niro, the control freak who hadn't at that stage quite got himself under control. At times, he even reminded me of the more witty Bruce Willis.