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Taxi Driver (1976)

Director: Martin Scorsese

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From Time Out London

It’s almost tempting to see this reissue of Martin Scorsese’s uncomfortably visceral, neon-lit portrait of psychotic urban alienation as the NFT’s sly riposte to ‘Superman Returns’ – a lesson in the dangers of unchecked Messianism and the urge to cure a sick world. In fact it’s showing as part of the season devoted to composer Bernard Herrmann, whose remarkable score – completed hours before his death in December 1975 – offers our best chance of understanding increasingly unhinged zero-tolerance cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) on his own terms.

A vet who takes to nocturnal cab-driving as a distraction from chronic insomnia, Bickle is a casualty of the sex war as well as Vietnam, seeking to ‘rescue’ first Presidential campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) and then juvenile prostitute Iris (12-year-old Jodie Foster, already adept at spinning humiliation into self-reliance) from what he perceives as the cesspit of Manhattan. Scorsese offers a fair bit of support for this perspective, from the banal closed-mindedness of Bickle’s fellow drivers to the director’s own cameo as a murderously jealous passenger.

Initially, De Niro’s performance is a masterclass in contained indignation and a creepy willingness to be amused; Herrmann’s bluesy saxophone voices Bickle’s world-weary romanticism even as cymbal and snare crescendos hint at seismic ructions rumbling underneath. Once set on a course of self-aggrandising retribution, the score echoes his determination, with martial horns and drums unnervingly offset by the hysterical harp of a self-appointed avenging angel. Yet when the metal trap into which Bickle has translated his body is sprung, the resulting carnage – still horrific two decades on – unfolds without music, before Scorsese ushers us into a profoundly unsettling coda. New York may have changed, but ‘Taxi Driver’ is as powerful and painful as ever.

Author: Ben Walters 2006-07-11 10:47:06

Time Out London Issue 1873: July 12-19 2006