Overlooked Movie Marathon 2: Taxi Driver (1976)

Do you know how many times I’ve heard the phrase “Martin Scorsese should have won best director at the Oscars for Taxi Driver and not The Departed?”  Do you?  I’ve heard that so many times that my head nears the brink of explosion whenever I think about it.  Right now, I’m about ready to blast my brain tissue all over the walls.  Not in a violent way.  Just in an irritation kind of way.  It bugs me when people say that.  It’s not that I think Taxi Driver is a bad movie or anything.  Oh no.  It’s a good movie.  But the competition that year was stiff and only one director can win.  Well, who knows?  There could be a tie at some point in the future.  But as far as I know, only one movie can have the director win the award.  And the fact that he wasn’t even nominated, which could be argued as a bad choice on the Academy’s part, only goes to show that the competition was stiff.  This paragraph really has nothing to do with my opinion on Taxi Driver, but I felt the need to rant a little bit about people who say things like this.  The competition in 1976 and 2006 was vastly different.  Scorsese won in 2006 because he was voted the best director in all of the movies for that year.  He didn’t get nominated in 1976 because he wasn’t voted as one of the best directors of that year.  It’s not because he was a bad director in 1976, but because the movies were different and people’s tastes were different.  I think it’s time for me to move on to actually writing about Taxi Driver.

Taxi Driver is the eighth movie, I think, in the second annual Overlooked Movie Marathon.  That’s right.  Until now, I had not seen Taxi Driver.  It was directed by Martin Scorsese.  Taxi Driver stars Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle, a nighttime taxi driver (hence the name), who wants to rid the city of New York of the scum that resides there.  Along the way, Travis meets presidential candidate Palantine (Leonard Harris), his campaign people (Albert Brooks and Cybill Shepherd), a taxi driver named Wizard (Peter Boyle), a teenage prostitute (Jodie Foster), and her pimp (Harvey Keitel).  It’s basically a movie about the mental state of Travis Bickle, and you’re along for the downward spiral of a ride that it is.

Taxi Driver is a movie that starts in a fairly dark place and only gets darker as it goes along.  I mean this in a purely thematic way, not in the sense that Travis Bickle drives taxis at night.  The movie begins by laying out a thesis of how New York is not a good city.  The people within the city are terrible people who do terrible things.  This is all told through Travis’s voiceover near the beginning of the movie.  As the viewers are brought along for Travis’s journey, the movie begins to reveal some of the people who help to make New York City the mess that it is.  We spend time with a man whose wife is cheating on him.  We experience the bigotry of society at the time.  Then we delve into the world of underage prostitution.  Taxi Driver sheds a light on a world that makes you want to spend hours in the shower.  You feel dirty after watching Taxi Driver.

What really drives the movie, however, is Travis Bickle’s journey through this part of New York City that isn’t really thought about too much today.  Yes, we’re almost forty years removed.  Yes, New York City has changed during that time.  But the world set up in Taxi Driver existed, and some of it still exists.  Watching Travis traverse this world is exciting, interesting, and entertaining.  It might not be the same sort of action packed fun as the summer blockbusters of recent years, but the character study that is being done throughout Taxi Driver is just as engrossing.  As a viewer, you’re invested in what is going on, even if you do not relate to the character of Travis.  Part of it is the exceptional writing of the character, part of it is the top notch directing, and a lot of it comes down to the great performance by Robert DeNiro.  When DeNiro turns on that thing that gets him to act, it is hard to find a better actor.  It’s hard to think of his top performances without Travis Bickle being in the mix.  This is one of DeNiro’s best performances.  Watching the character lose his sense of reality and fall into the pit of despair that is New York City is captivating.  The character might not be relatable, but the events unfolding are still a wonder to the eyes and the mind.  DeNiro sells the character more than I think any other actor could.

Taxi Driver is a dark movie.  It’s not all puppies and rainbows and unicorns.  This is a story about the dirtier world of New York City as told through a mentally unstable character.  It is captivating to watch and meaningful to explore.  This is a movie I should have seen sooner, but might not have had such an experience at a younger age.  If you haven’t seen it, you should.  It’s well worth the two hours.

The next movie in the second annual Overlooked Movie Marathon is going to be Robocop.  I don’t know what it is about the movie that stopped me from ever watching it before.  That’s how I feel about most of the movies in this marathon.  I simply overlooked them.  And now I’m catching up.  I’ll be back soon with the post for Robocop.