Summary
Travis Bickle is an army vet just trying to rejoin society. He gets a job as a Taxi Driver so he can avoid the day time noise and crowd of the city but the nighttime sleaze and filth pushes him further to the edges of his sanity.
A Second Look
“Taxi Driver” is an American classic. Very early in any cinephile’s journey it will come up as a must watch film. This carries with it a danger, though. For some, like myself, they end up seeing Taxi Driver when they aren’t really mature enough as a film watcher do appreciate it.
After seeing Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed,” I wanted to dig into more of his films and while he didn’t direct "Taxi Driver,” he did write it. I’m also not a big Scorsese fan but really it’s more that I’m not a fan of gangster films and he makes a lot of them. I love Scorsese when he isn’t doing the mob, so I wanted to revisit “Taxi Driver,” for that reason as well.
A Scorsese film I have a shot at liking? I couldn’t let myself go on, disliking Taxi Driver just because I was too young when I saw it the first time.
My Thoughts
So there was definitely a lot about this film that I didn’t understand or catch the first time I saw it. Having been raised pretty conservatively I was not aware of many of the issues Bickle was dealing with throughout the film.
Perhaps more than anything else though, the thing that I most didn’t get when I was younger was that it is a character study.
I remember feeling that nothing was happening in the film when I watched it the first time. For someone whose main movie experience is with typical Hollywood fare, a film which simply follows a person around and the main plot is happening within the inner workings of their brain, is a bit alien feeling.
As an more experienced cinephile, I now appreciate and can see what the film is doing, even in the moments which I do not relate to as well.
What The Film Is Doing
The film is an exploration of a conflict that lies within the heart of humanity and especially idealists. It certainly is at the heart of Paul Schrader’s writing. The conflict between our thoughts and ideals versus our actions and practice.
In the film, Bickle is struggling with the fighting he has done, the filth it seems he fought for, the disdain ‘normal’ society treats him with and his inability to change any of it.
He has ideas about how he might be able to change things by dating, getting a job, helping an innocent girl who he sympathizes with, but all of these efforts are met with frustration and rejection. Even the job he gets as a cabbie merely brings the sleaze and decay from outside the car to the inside.
The pain of this conflict is raw on De Niro's face as he turns in the greatest performance of his life. There is not a single aspect of Travis Bickle that seems forced, faked, or put on. The terror of what Travis might do is precisely because of the fact that you can see some one, with such a raw and hurt character, doing something terrible. That character feel totally embodied by the performer so that even though De Niro is one of the most recognizable actors in the world, he blends into Bickle, seemlessly disappearing and becoming one of the faceless taxi cab ferryman of New York.
The Struggle
In essence, this film is about the struggle we all have before us, to hold an ideal and live with that which is not ideal. It is a grievous ill, of this present life, that we may glimpse what is whole and healthy and fulfilled, yet reach with all our might and grasp only to pull back our hand, empty.
What we do with that anger is a question for all of us and one Travis Bickle answers for himself in violence. Hopefully, by seeing his struggle, we may find a way to sympathize and identify with his pain and learn from his fate.
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