Taxi Driver (1976) review

*contains spoilers

This has to be to be one of the most influential movies ever made. Anytime you see a loner character in a contemporary film there is a very high chance that the director or writer of that film has been influenced by "Taxi Driver". From "Drive", "Joker" to "Nightcrawler" - you see this a lot.

I had watched it once or twice before and I was confused and somewhat annoyed by the ambiguous ending. Did Travis die in the shoot out scene and dream the final scene before dying or is everything you see really taking place? Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of the film, has said that the end is not a dream - it definitely looks and feels like one. Either way I have much more appreciation for the movie now.

What I like about the film is how it takes the tropes of a Western film and turns it on its head. I read that the film is heavily influenced by the John Wayne film "The Searchers". In that movie John Wayne's character is a Civil War veteran on a mission to "rescue" his niece Debbie (it's debatable whether or not she actually needs to be rescued) who has been kidnapped by Native Americans. In "Taxi Driver" Robert DeNiro is a Vietnam veteran who has the personality of a deranged cowboy with New York City replacing the wild west. I saw someone on youtube say that his taxi cab is the equivalent of his horse. He wears cowboy boots and at one point is even called a cowboy. He is on a mission to "rescue" a young prostitute named Iris.

DeNiro's character Travis Bickle looks normal and he's even handsome. He has insomnia and passes time by working long hours as a taxi driver and frequenting porn theaters. The night cinematography is gorgeous and really captures the sinister side of New York in the 1970s. One day he spots Betsy and for about ten minutes the movie almost feels like a romantic comedy. He becomes infatuated with her and wins her over with his charisma that is borderline manipulative. He takes her to a porn theater on a date and she walks out on him. As a viewer I felt sorry and empathy for Travis but his behavior is clearly misguided and self-sabotaging. Any normal, decent woman would have walked out on him after being taken to a porn theater.

This leads him down a dark path where he replaces his desire for Betsy with a deep focus on a young sex worker named Iris. He also starts buying guns and developing a plan for assassinating a presidential candidate that Betsy was campaigning for. In the films most famous moment Travis is talking to to himself in a mirror and practicing his gun slinging skills. He's clearly emulating Western cowboys and the scene is both funny and scary. What makes it scary is how we are taken into the mind of an unhinged killer as he narrates his thoughts on society. In 2019 it's commonplace to see these kinds of deranged killers in the news who have gone on a mass shooting spree. Travis is a former soldier so he's a skilled assassin, he's armed with multiple guns, he's mentally disturbed but he thinks he's going to be some kind of John Wayne hero.

The real power of the film is that it shows a character that had never been studied in an American film. This is what happens when an isolated, mentally disturbed war veteran loses control of reality. It's also a commentary on the Western movie hero and how these John Wayne characters that were previously glorified are in fact not really heroes at all. Many of them were racist and evil.

In the end his assassination plots fails so he instead takes out his violence by killing Iris's pimp Sport, who strongly resembles a Native American, along with a few other criminals. Travis is hailed as a hero even though his intentions weren't altruistic and he's mentally unstable.

In the final scene he's back in his taxi cab and he looks normal and handsome again. In a surreal moment Betsy is in the backseat and we only see her reflection in the rearview mirror. Her head looks like it's floating and there is an ethereal quality to her beauty. She exits the cab and Travis drives away. Then we hear a scratchy blip in the sound, the lighting looks grittier and Travis does a paranoid, manic double glance in the mirror - it is as if he's ready for another violent, misguided mission.