TAXI DRIVER

TAXI DRIVER









By VINCENT CANBY



You talkin' to me?'
Becoming increasingly neurotic, New York cab driver Travis Bickle is alone in his seedy apartment, having stocked up on arms to carry out a meaningless plan to assassinate governor Palantine (Leonard Harris). He's wearing a combat jacket and addressing the mirror, but his words are delivered straight to camera. 'You talkin' to me?' he snarls. 'You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well, I'm the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you're talkin' to? Oh yeah? Huh?' The gun shoots out of his sleeve. 'Try it, you fuck!'

According to screenwriter Paul Schrader, the bulk of De Niro's narration was scripted, although this particular scene was improvised. "In the script it just says, 'Travis speaks to himself in the mirror.' Bobby [De Niro] asked me what he would say, and I said, 'Well, he's a little kid playing with guns and acting tough.' So De Niro used this rap that an underground New York comedian had been using at the time as the basis for his lines. Because the scene was filmed in one of Manhattan's noisiest areas, Scorsese kept asking De Niro to repeat the line in case the microphone lost it. But it recorded perfectly, and Scorsese kept it all."





The steam billowing up around the manhole cover in the street is a dead giveaway. Manhattan is a thin cement lid over the entrance to hell, and the lid is full of cracks. Hookers, hustlers, pimps, pushers, frauds, and freaks—they're all at large. They form a busy, faceless, unrepentant society that knows a secret litany. On a hot summer night the cement lid becomes a nonstop harangue written in neon: walk, stop, go, come, drink, eat, try, enjoy. Enjoy? That's the biggest laugh. Only the faceless ones—the human garbage—could enjoy it.

This is the sort of thing that Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) might make note of in his diary. Travis, a loner who comes from somewhere else, drives a Manhattan cab at night. In the day he sleeps in short naps, pops pills to calm down, swigs peach brandy, which he sometimes pours on his breakfast cereal, and goes to porn films to relax. At one point he is aware that his headaches are worse and he suspects that he may have stomach cancer.




Travis Bickle is the hero of Martin Scorsese's flamboyant new film, Taxi Driver, which opened yesterday at the Coronet. He's as nutty as they come, a psychotic, but as played by Mr. De Niro he's a riveting character inhabiting a landscape that's as much his creation as he is the creation of it.

Taxi Driver is in many ways a much more polished film than Mr. Scorsese's other major Manhattan movie, Mean Streets, but its polish is what ultimately makes it seem less than the sum of its parts. The original screenplay by Paul Schrader, one of Hollywood's new young hopes (writers' division) imposes an intellectual scheme upon Travis's story that finally makes it seem too simple. It robs the film of mystery. At the end you may feel a bit cheated, as you do when the solution of a whodunit fails to match the grandeur of the crime.












But until those final moments Taxi Driver is a vivid, galvanizing portrait of a character so particular that you may be astonished that he makes consistent dramatic sense. Psychotics are usually too different, too unreliable, to be dramatically useful except as exotic decor.

Travis Bickle—the collaboration of writer, director, and actor—remains fascinating throughout, probably because he is more than a character who is certifiably insane. He is a projection of all our nightmares of urban alienation, refined in a performance that is effective as much for what Mr. De Niro does as for how he does it. Acting of this sort is rare in films. It is a display of talent, which one gets in the theater, as well as a demonstration of behavior, which is what movies usually offer.

Were Mr. De Niro less an actor, the character would be a sideshow freak. The screenplay, of course, gives him plenty to work with. Until the final sequences, Taxi Driver has a kind of manic aimlessness that is a direct reflection of Travis's mind, capable of spurts of common sense and discipline that are isolated in his general confusion. Travis writes in his diary, "I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention," and then sets about to make a name for himself by planning a political assassination.

Travis is an accumulation of self-destruct mechanisms. He makes friends with a pretty, intelligent campaign worker, played by Cybill Shepherd (who here recoups the reputation lost in At Long Last Love), but wonders why she is shocked when he takes her to the porn films he likes so much. His mind is full of crossed wires and short circuits.

The point of the film (which I can't talk about without giving away the plot), is, I feel, questionable, but the rest of it works. The supporting performances are fine, including those of Jodie Foster (whom I last saw as Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer) as a teenage hustler, Harvey Keitel as her pimp, and Peter Boyle as a muddle-headed Manhattan cab driver.

You may want to argue with Taxi Driver at the end, and with good reason, but it won't be a waste of time.