The Urban Loneliness Syndrome: Taxi Driver | Movie Review

If a few years before, Scorsese's (re) meeting with Robert De Niro had meant a crucial event in the lives of both artists, it was no less what happened in 1974, and again thanks to Brian De Palma, the director knew to screenwriter Paul Schrader. The story of Schrader, who in time would also become an important director, is well known: raised in strict Calvinism, until the age of 17 it was impossible for him to see a movie. Once he did, he completely fell in love with the medium, and made up all the time he lost, becoming a die-hard movie buff and a highly regarded writer of and about cinema. A friendship soon emerged between him and Scorsese that derives from mutual respect, with certain common characteristics, such as a fervent passion for cinema, which would result in four films written by the former and directed by the latter.

As a writer of stories of denial and violence, Schrader occasionally recounts how he conceived "Taxi Driver." In a manic depressive state, caused by his emotional problems with his ex-wife and another relationship, Schrader was wandering in a deplorable state through the streets of Los Angeles. For weeks he did nothing other than drink, drive and walk, passing through the seediest neighborhoods of the Californian capital and eating nothing or almost nothing. He finally had to be hospitalized, as an ulcer knocked him out. It was the abrupt conclusion of a race to the death, which he would atone from within himself by writing the story of Travis Bickle a year later. In his own words, he wanted to express "the absolute syndrome of urban loneliness." And he wrote the script very quickly, because he felt the urge to do so.

This is how the creation of one of the most influential films of that decade began, which was originally to be played by Jeff Bridges, but once it fell into Scorsese's hands, it seemed inevitable that Robert De Niro, who had just risen With the Oscar for best supporting actor for 'The Godfather, Part II' he will play the disturbed New York taxi driver. Filming took place during a brutal heat wave in New York, filming De Niro arrived two weeks later. The taxi that Travis drives so many sequences was almost scrapped for some impressive shots from inside. Anything was possible to make a film that, Scorsese was sure, was going to be a milestone in his career, as it ultimately was. Although he also knew that he would not be as commercially successful as the investors expected of him.

With 'Subsoil Memories', the masterpiece written by Fyodor Dostoyevski in 1864, and 'False culprit' ('The Wrong Man', Hitchcock, 1956) as maximum literary and filmic references (although Scorsese and Schrader often cite other sources of various inspiration) this film could easily be one of the most horrifying portraits of sleepwalking in the entire history of cinema, which has seen many famous titles about the eternal night city, but very few that reach it in darkness, despair and existentialism . A fierce existentialism that envelops the tragic and sinister figure of Travis Bickle like a halo of curse, making him one of the most proverbial Scorsesian characters, because he embodies the obsession and violence so typical of the filmmaker like no other. We do not want to follow him, because we know that everything will end very badly, but we cannot take our eyes off the screen.

Scorsese films with a hallucinatory staging, serene but very tense, compassionate but wild. Aided in camera work by the operator Michael Chapman, who would not in vain sign here, along with the upcoming 'Wild Bull' ('Raging Bull', 1980) his best work, Scorsese achieves absolute technical perfection in planning and assembly , and total mastery in the rhythm, tone, and point of view of the story. New York as an inhospitable, icy and dangerous city that, through Travis's (increasingly insane) point of view, becomes a hell that he, the exterminating angel, must purge. And although Scorsese partially understands his protagonist, under no circumstances does he share his vision of the world. In other words, he invites us to follow this taxi driver, but he makes it very clear that he does not identify with him, contrary to what some critics have wanted to see. At no time, except in the ghostly shots of the city lights, do we obtain subjective shots that mimic the gaze of the central character. We end up suspecting that his extreme otherness is the fundamental reason why the curious unrepentant Scorsese tells us this story.

Now that his career has come to a sudden, early and brutal twilight, we can take a look at his impressive track record and cast some of his best roles. Among them, in all likelihood, is Travis Bickle. The actor, true to his famous perfectionist style, spent two weeks driving a taxi, and even got in touch with some Vietnam veterans to develop some typical accents and expressions of these soldiers. For the movie, he would carry out one of his most memorable physical transformations. He first lost ten kilos and then gained them in muscles. Finally, he shaved his hair in the tomahawk style. It was essential that De Niro gave himself to his character in this way, since Travis considers his body as a combat weapon and as an expression of his own inner change and sacrifice, at the same time.

Many were surprised that he did not win the Oscar, which went posthumously to Peter Finch for 'Network, an implacable world' ('Network', Lumet, 1976). De Niro is simply Travis Bickle. And what's more, it becomes him without apparent effort (although an immense job and talent behind it is guessed). With his own body, with his silences and with his disconnected lines of dialogue, we can see in an incredible way how dementia gradually takes hold of Travis, until it pushes him to commit acts of extreme violence. The fact that his victims are pedophiles or gangsters hardly seems relevant. With suicidal determination (like a samurai), the taxi driver transforms himself into a killing machine, because he believes that it is the only way to preserve the innocence he sees in Iris (a perfect thirteen-year-old Jodie Foster), a prostitute to the He decides to save once he realizes that his ultimate sexual desire, the sensual and elegant Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), has been left out of his reach.

Without a doubt, Scorsese's best film up to that point, which won the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival with all the merits and acclaim. In a professional and creative climb that made him forget his complicated beginnings, Scorsese became, in that year, a star director, at the height of his most famous generation companions, a prestige that has not abandoned him to this day. . 'Taxi Driver' is an exceptional masterpiece due to its extreme risk and aesthetic coherence, because it does not seek easy solutions to violence nor does it intend to cajole the viewer with a precious savagery, and because in its very black cynicism a compassionate perception of the pain of the loneliness.