Thursday, September 8, 2011

#52 Taxi Driver (1976)


Jimmy Fallon is a cop!  Queen Latifah is sassy and black!  Together, they fight crime in a tricked-out cab!
Sorry, wait...wrong movie.  I guess I'll send that disc back, after I max out the fun meter, of course.

Technically, I've seen this movie before.  But not really. Back in the mid 90's, I worked at a movie theatre in San Diego called Hillcrest Cinemas.  It was a Landmark theatre, so we were all hoity-toity and special and shit, and did things like run Il Postino for 13 months straight. Occasionally, on Friday nights, we would wait until midnight and have a movie screening party, and invite our friends and bring lots of pot and booze and watch movies that hadn't been released yet, or perhaps old movies. On one such night, we watched Taxi Driver.  But of course, I was drinking a blue plastic cup filled with Jack Daniels and cranberry juice (don't ask)  and I wasn't paying much attention. Oh, and also about halfway through we realized the red-eyed projectionist had put in the second reel wrong and suddenly we were watching Travis Bickle walking around upside-down and backwards, making alien "yip yip yip" sounds. And the kicker: we all just kept watching, hoping the problem would somehow soon fix itself.  It didn't. So no, I haven't seen this movie before.

Plot summary (with spoilers): Vietnam vet Travis Bickle drives a cab at night in New York City. It's the mid 70's years before sainted hero Guiliani cleaned up the town, and after work, Travis goes to a porno theatre, flirts with a female employee (!) at the concession stand (!!) and then buys some popcorn and soda (!!!) before finding his seat. Jesus, lock him up now.
Travis hates the city he lives in, hates the scum and the whores and the queers and the spooks who lurk about at night. But one day, one beautiful morning, he spots  Betsy, a campaign worker who is attempting to get NY Senator Charles Palantine elected president. Betsy has whimsical, breezy conversations with fellow employee Tom, but there's no chemistry there; Tom's kind of a cold fish, so when Travis enters campaign headquarters under the pretext of becoming a volunteer and winds up asking Betsy out for coffee, she accepts. The coffee date goes okay.  Travis is a bit too eager to unnecessarily slag off Tom, but Betsy's fine with it, and mostly sees Travis as a fun diversion, a walk on the wild side. Of course, Travis is pretty much fully in love and asks her out to dinner in two nights. She accepts.
The night before their second date, a super creepy dude directs himself in a monologue, talking in the back of Travis' cab, telling him eagerly about how he's going to kill his girlfriend for cheating on him with a black guy, but his terminology is less PC than that.
And then Travis meets Betsy at her apartment, and walks her to the movie theatre. The porno movie theatre.  She protests, but he insists that couples come all the time, she'll have a blast, and the popcorn's yummy, what with the extra "butter".  (Sorry).
After a couple minutes of watching the world's creepiest porno, in media res no less, Betsy's had enough and bolts. Travis begs and pleads with her to stay, to give him another chance, but to no avail. He calls her multiple times in the next few days and finally shows up at her work, all nine kinds of yelly and white trashy and gets booted out by Tom. It's a brutally embarrassing scene.
At night, in the cab, Travis sits in total despair. A young girl, all of twelve, jumps in the back seat and begs him to drive away, drive anywhere! Suddenly, a man is opening the door and pulling her out. He gives Travis a rumpled up twenty dollar bill, tells him to forget what he saw. Travis is stunned. He can't even bring himself to touch the money.
Travis decides he needs to be armed and buys some illegal guns and straps them to various parts of his body, including a spring loaded one on his arm. Are you talking to me? Well, you must be, I'm the only one here. Indeed.
On another day, he sees the little girl again, walking down the street. He offers to pay for her services. She tells him to arrange a meeting with Sport over there on the corner. Sport assures Travis she's great. She'll make your cock explode, cum on her tits, cum on her face, whatever. Sport seems to be a not so nice guy.
They go to a nearby hotel, pay another scumbag ten more dollars, and head up to a room. Travis wants to know the girl's name.
K.C.
No, your real name.
I hate my real name.
But she tells him it's Iris, and she makes a play for his pants, and cripes this is fucking gross.  Travis agrees with me, and pushes her off. He says he'll rescue her, but she says she doesn't need rescuing. He says she tried to escape the other day in his cab, but she waves that off, saying she doesn't remember it, and was probably just stoned. Travis begs Iris to let him help her, send her back home to her folks, but she maintains that her folks hate her and Sport is the only one who loves her.
Travis goes home, dejected, but learns of a rally for Senator Palantine the next day. He takes all his money and puts it in an envelope addressed to Iris. His note encourages her to take the money and run. He shows up at the rally, now with a mohawk. He obviously didn't read Assassination for Dummies, which has like a whole chapter on how to blend in in a crowd. Palantine makes his speech, and comes down from the platform, and Travis charges. But the Secret Service are onto him and move to intercept. He manages to slip away and race down the street.
Frustrated, he goes back to his shitty little apartment, chugs some liquor, practices his draw, and basically tries his hardest to give me the fucking willies. That night he goes out again, and this time goes to the corner where Sport hangs out. After a brief confrontation, where somehow Sport doesn't recognize Travis' psychotic thousand-yard stare as a threat, Travis shoots him in the gut. Then, he goes to the shitbag hotel next door, and shoots the hand off the other dude. The shots are kinetic and washed out, and I do my best not to notice how fakey it all looks. Another guy grazes Travis' neck with a shot and then Sport shows up and shoots him in the arm. Travis' gun runs out of bullets, but the spring-loaded number pops out and he blows Sport away. The last man runs away, into the hotel room where Iris is, and Iris screams at Travis and curls up into a ball and weeps as the man's face is blown off. Then Travis puts the gun under his chin and fires. But the bullets are out. So he sits on the couch and waits to die. Very quickly, the cops show up. Travis lifts his bloody hand to his temple in the shape of a gun and "fires" it twice at his own temple, making those "pow, pow" sounds you make when you pretend to shoot yourself after just killing three people in front of a twelve year old girl. He grins the grin of the truly crazy as we fade out.
...and fade back in. Some time has passed. A bunch of newspaper articles hailing a local hero are cut out and taped onto a wall, as well as a loving thank you letter from Iris' parents, thanking the wonderful hero Travis for rescuing their daughter. Travis gets up and goes to work. The other cabbies talk to him warmly, the whole city seems brighter and cleaner. Travis has a fare. It's Betsy. She saw him in the papers, hopes he's okay, is impressed with his bravery. Travis demurs, says it was nothing. He doesn't charge her a fare. She's smiles and thanks him. He hopes to see her again. As he drives away smiling, he catches sight of something bothersome in the rearview mirror and his face goes cloudy again. It was probably nothing. Hopefully it was nothing.

Review: Okay so, wow. Obviously, one of the best acting performances ever. It's so surprise to anyone, but it bears repeating that Bobby fucking DeNiro is a freaking genius. Some of his facial expressions creeped me out more than any actor I've ever seen in a movie, even more than Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs. He's truly a masterful actor, even managing to engender a fair amount of sympathy in the viewer for Travis. It's clear he's screwed up inside, but wants desperately to be a good decent normal guy, and just doesn't know how. And of course Scorsese was robbed at the Oscars. He was robbed for Goodfellas, and he was robbed here. And I say that in full confidence not even knowing what movie won that year. Probably some feel-good period piece bullshit. Also spectacular: Jodie Foster. I mean, you pretty much need a silkwood shower after watching her kneel down in front of DeNiro and unbutton his pants, and that's because she made it convincing. She's right up there with Haley Joel Osmet and Dakota Fanning for me.  Utterly convincing as an old soul in a young body.
But the ending: what does it mean?  Lots of theories out there. Travis' dying dream?  Actual reality? I like the irony of it being real, of Travis being labeled a hero, no one but us knowing the real story. But is it believable? I mean, shouldn't the cops be asking why he didn't just report the child prostitution ring to the cops? And all his guns were purchased illegally, why didn't he get in trouble for that? And is it believable that Betsy would seek him out and flirt with him, knowing full well what a creep he is, just because he helped a little girl? That doesn't seem believable to me. Granted, to whole movie had a surreal, dreamlike quality to it, so why should I expect realism in the end? But doesn't the fact that it was so dreamlike support the theory that it was in fact, a dream of Travis?  Ugh, my head hurts.  Damn you, Marty!

Stars: Four and a half out of five. Ultimately, I can't help but shake the feeling that the ending is a bit too weird and a bit too much of a copout, and can't give it five stars.

Next, "West Side Story" and then...sigh.  It was inevitable. That fucking Hobbit movie.









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