![]() ![]() (At Cannes, the announcement that it had won the Palme d’Or was greeted with boos.) How could reviewers not be wary? Taxi Driver is nakedly opposed even to itself, as well as the culture that produced it. The cab driver lives by night in a world of myth, populated by a host of supporting archetypes: the astonishing Jodie Foster as Iris, the 12-year-old hooker living the life in the rat’s-ass end of the ’60s, yet dreaming of a commune in Vermont Harvey Keitel as her affably nauseating pimp Peter Boyle’s witless cabbie sage and Cybill Shepherd’s bratty golden girl, a suitably petit-bourgeois Daisy Buchanan to Travis’s lumpen Gatsby.īrilliant and yet repellent, at times even hateful, Taxi Driver inspired understandable ambivalence. Seen through his rain-smeared windshield, Manhattan becomes a movie-call it “Malignopolis”-in which, as noted by Amy Taubin in her terrific Taxi Driver monograph, “the entire cast of Superfly seems to have been assembled in Times Square” to feed Travis’s fantasies. Moreover, the movie’s antihero, Travis Bickle-a homicidal combination of Dirty Harry and Norman Bates who describes himself as God’s Lonely Man-sprang from the brain of former film critic Paul Schrader and, as embodied for all eternity by the young Robert De Niro, all but instantly became a classic character in the American narrative alongside Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield.Ĭitizen of a sodden Sodom where the steamy streets are always wet with tears, among other bodily fluids, Bickle embarks each evening on a glistening sea of sleaze. It was the most cinephilic movie ever made in Hollywood, openly acknowledging Bresson, Hitchcock, Godard, avant-gardists Michael Snow and Kenneth Anger, and the John Ford of The Searchers. And yet Taxi Driver was essentially collaborative. ![]() Certainly no American since Welles had so confidently presented himself as a star director. Lasting nearly 20 minutes and fueled by Bernard Herrmann’s rhapsodic score, the de facto overture is a densely edited salmagundi of effects-slow motion, fragmenting close-ups, voluptuous camera moves, and trick camera placement-that may be the showiest pure filmmaking in any Hollywood movie since Touch of Evil. ![]() Scorsese didn’t direct Taxi Driver so much as orchestrate its elements. The movie further established its 33-year-old director as both Hollywood’s designated artist and, after Taxi Driver was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes, an international sensation-the decisive influence on neo–New Wave filmmakers as varied as Spike Lee, Wong Kar-wai, and Quentin Tarantino. Inspired by one failed political assassination (the 1972 shooting of presidential hopeful George Wallace), it inadvertently motivated another (the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan). The 12th top-grossing movie of 1976, Taxi Driver was not just a hit but, like Psycho or Bonnie and Clyde, an event in American popular culture-perhaps even an intervention. It synthesized noir, neorealist, and New Wave stylistics it assimilated Hollywood’s recent vigilante cycle, drafting then-déclassé blaxploitation in the service of a presumed tell-it-like-it-is naturalism that, predicated on a frank, unrelenting representation of racism, violence, and misogyny, was even more racist, violent, and misogynist than it allowed. It came, it saw, it zapped the body politic right between the eyes.Ĭelebrating its 35th anniversary with a newly restored print and a two-week Film Forum run, Taxi Driver was a powerfully summarizing work. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver-a movie in which the most celebrated line asks the audience, “Are you talkin’ to me?”-is one such film. ![]() Some motion pictures produce the uncanny sensation of returning the spectator’s gaze. ![]()
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