Length of Film: 113 minutesDirector: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Peter Boyle, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Leonard Harris, Albert Brooks, Diahnne Abbott, Frank Adu, Victor Argo, Gino Ardito, Garth Avery, Harry Cohn, Copper Cunningham, Brenda Dickson-Weinberg
Oscar nomination: Michael Phillips, Julia Phillips (best picture), Robert De Niro (actor), Jodie Foster (actress in support role), Bernard Herrmann (music)
Cannes Film Festival: Martin Scorsese (Golden Palm)
I'm gonna piss a lot people off with this review...I didn't like the movie. It held my attention thoughout the whole thing, but the ending confused me, and it left me puzzled and a movie should have a definite ending; crystal clear.
Travis Bickle is a veteran from the marines who was discharged in 1973. Being bored, and not being able to sleep, he decides to get a job as a taxi driver, to help with his insomnia. Driving around, he noticed a pretty lady, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) working as a volunteer at an office promoting senator Palantine for the presidency. He awkwardly walks into the building and flat out, asks her out.
She agrees to coffee and pie when she has a break at 4. He was so excited, and socially behaves himself. She states that he is a lot like Kris Kristofferson's song "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33". She agrees to go on a second date to the movies. He happily goes to a record store and buys her the album. Travis takes Betsy to a porno, and she gets uncomfortable and leaves.
After being dismissed by Betsy, he goes in a deep place and decides to buy 4 guns. He focuses on working out, and decides to to make his own gun holder sleeve that retracts when he flicks his arm. Actually pretty bad ass!
He helps a grocery store clerk who is held up a gunpoint, and shoots the man. He flees the scene because his guns aren't registered. On one of his night rides, he sees a young girl (Jodie Foster) who tries to get into his taxi, but is then dragged off by a man, who throws a $20 bill for him to forget about the whole thing, except he didn't... in the back of his mind, he kept thinking of this young girl. DON'T GET ME WRONG...HE'S NOT INTERESTED IN HER SEXUALLY, HE WANTS TO HELP HER.
He flags the young girl down, and she directs him to talk to her pimp, Matthew (Harvey Keitel). He informs Travis that's she's 12 1/2 years old and he'll never experience a pussy like hers. Iris and Travis go up to a room, which costs him $10 and she continues to undress herself, and then trying to undo Travis' pants. He reminds Iris that they've met before, and she recalls not remembering, that she must've been high.
Travis makes it his mission to help save this girl. He invites her to breakfast to get more of a backstory of why she ran away and Iris states that she's happy with her decision and doesn't want to go back home. He becomes obsessed with saving Iris, and decides the only way to save her, is releasing her from the power of Matthew, her pimp. He shaves his head into a mohawk, and goes out to kill him. He approaches Matthew, shoots him, shoots the motel owner, shoots Iris' paid customer. Being injured himself, and scaring Iris, Travis puts a gun to his throat, then pulls the trigger, multiple times, but the clip is empty. He sits down on the couch, puts his index finger to his temple, and moves his thumb, representing a gun.
Roger Ebert, wrote this about the ending of Taxi Driver. I had to research the ending because I had no idea what happened. I didn't know what was real, and what was Travis' imagination. I took the ending as Travis was having a psychological break, and imagined him being the hero, saving little Iris, but he got off, killing 3 men scotch free.
"There has been much discussion about the ending, in which we see newspaper clippings about Travis's 'heroism' of saving Iris, and then Betsy gets into his cab and seems to give him admiration instead of her earlier disgust. Is this a fantasy scene? Did Travis survive the shoot-out? Are we experiencing his dying thoughts? Can the sequence be accepted as literally true? ... I am not sure there can be an answer to these questions. The end sequence plays like music, not drama: It completes the story on an emotional, not a literal, level. We end not on carnage but on redemption, which is the goal of so many of Scorsese's characters."
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=//20040101/REVIEWS08/401010364/1023
I still don't know what to think about this movie... I'm puzzled to why Travis is alive and how he wasn't thrown into jail, and I'm surprised that Iris compromised to go back home and live a normal teenager life after living a certain lifestyle in New York City. What really confused me was right after the bloody killing scenes, it flashes to a wall taped with newspaper articles and a note from Iris' parents. We later see Travis leaning by a Taxi with his friends, with a full head of hair, joking around like nothing happened. How much time passed? Did Travis spend anytime in jail? How could the police consider him a "hero" when he killed 3 men? Yes...these men were awful and deserved to die, but Travis should've had a consequence for killing these men. I don't see Travis as heroic and I don't think that he should be an iconic character worth remembering. Iris was sleeping with these men willingly and wasn't asking for help. If Iris was truly trying to escape from Matthew, and cried during her visits with other men and wanted rescueing, I would have all for Travis swooping in and saving her, but she didn't want to be, so I say she lives a life of prostitution.
Iris was 12 and 1/2 years old. She can't consent to sex with adults in the state of New York. Iris wasn't willingly having sex with these men. She was a child sex slave doped up and abused into sexual servitude. We don't see any of these actions on screen, but killing a pimp that uses 12 year old girls back in the day when this was shot was something the NYPD wouldn't have really given a shit about. That's just my opinion. I don't totally disagree with your opinion it's just that whole Iris consenting to sex sentence that bothered me.
ReplyDeleteThere's a throw-away line in the middle of the film which convinces me Bickle is dying throughout the epilogue. When Bickle fatally injures the mugger in in the convenience store, he asks the owner if he's still alive. The owner replies something along the lines of "his eyes are still moving." This ostensibly arbitrary line retrospectively seems to justify the idea that Bickle was merely moving his eyes, so to speak, at the end. The dramatic gasp he lets out while staring into the rear-view mirror in the very final scene is, as I take it, the last breath he drew.
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