Traffic

Rating: Null/10 (22 December 2001)

Spoilers herein.
Readers of my other comments know that I believe that there are different types of films, depending on whether the skeleton is the writer's, the actor's, or the camera's. The more I use it, the more confidence I have that in general, one drives out the other. Just before reseeing this, I worked on `One-Eyed Jacks,' which is probably the touchstone of the actor driving out the eye.
But here, we have a happy accident of three talents that don't step on each other: DeNiro, Schrader and Scorsese. Of these, Schrader is the strongest and every deviation from his vision weakens the fabric. The one main example is Keitel's dance with Jodie.
The key device here is that the narrator is Bickle. Everything is/must be something he personally witnesses (until his death) and reports to us. The idea is far from novel. Why it works here is Scorsese's intuition to play the camera OFF of Bickle, while De Niro works to keep the attention on him. That tension (which Schrader intended) is what makes this work.
But this is not perfect. Keitel, like De Niro doesn't get this dynamic; we don't want De Niro to, that would ruin the main device because we want him to pull to himself against the camera. But when Keitel does his stuff, it has a negative effect because there is no narrative countermeasure..
Foster's presence was good enough when this film was new because the very idea of a 12 year old whore was enough. But seeing it a quarter century later, you can see her thinness compared to the rest of the cast. They really understand their characters and crawl into them. She has no idea, none at all.
Another problem is the cab metaphor. Paul didn't quite center that one. He did get it right later with the ambulance in `Bringing Out the Dead,' which used the same energy of selfish actor pulling one way and camera pulling another way. But that time, they fought over the vehicle at the same time they fought in your mind. And of course that had De Palma's eye.
Finally, the camera we see here has energy, but far less than what Scorsese's buddy De Palma was doing at this time. Imagine what De Palma (or Hitchcock) would have done with that angel shot after the massacre.