Day 71: Taxi Driver (1976)

Movie #41 – Taxi Driver (1976) - 113 min, cert 18.

Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is a Vietnam vet who works nights as a New York cab driver to help him cope with his insomnia. The war has left him mentally unstable with few social skills. He persuades an attractive well-to-do blonde (Cybill Shepherd) to go on a date with him, but he takes her to a cinema showing hard-core porn, so she storms out and refuses to speak to him again. He tries and fails to assassinate a politician. He comes across Iris (Jodie Foster), a young girl being run as a prostitute by a flash young pimp and decides to rescue her.

There’s not a huge amount of plot in this movie, it’s more of a mood piece. It’s about the characters rather than the situations, or more specifically, it’s about one character – the taxi driver of the title. Bickle is something of an enigma. We are not told much about him. We know he was in Vietnam, but we don’t know any details about what he went through while he was there. We can probably assume that he went through a lot because he seems damaged now. He has no wife or girlfriend, no children, and no family except his parents who he writes occasional letters to but hasn’t seen in years.

He is disgusted by the sex and violence that he sees around him every night, but he still frequents the adult cinemas, and he chooses to drive his cab in the roughest parts of the city. He seems to feel the need to act, to do something that will improve the situation. He wants to be important, to matter. In the famous ‘Are you talkin’ to me?’ scene in front of the mirror in his apartment where he practices drawing the pistol hidden up his sleeve, you can see how the guns make him feel important. He stands more upright and his chest swells out with pride. He wants to be remembered, and it doesn’t really matter to him whether it’s as a hero or a villain. When Iris comes along he sees his chance, and he heads down a path that leads him inexorably towards the bloody conclusion.

Score – 9/10. Undeniably a great film, but probably not among my absolute personal favourites.

Next up is Terminator 2: Judgment Day. James Cameron’s slick sequel to his iconic sci-fi original.