The Streaming Canon, Vol. V: ‘Taxi Driver’ Is Still A Journey Like No Other, Even 40 Years Later

By Glenn Kenny @glenn__kenny
Published March 20, 2015, 12:00 p.m. ET

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Taxi Driver

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The conventional hook when you’re trying to sell someone on an “old” movie is to say, “It’s hard to believe that [Title X] was made FORTY YEARS AGO.” But here’s the thing about Taxi Driver, which was shot on location in New York City in the summer of 1975 and released in the U.S. in February of 1976 (and is now streaming on both Netflix and Amazon Prime): you absolutely CAN believe it was made 40 years ago. Especially if you knew/know the city. The New York of that movie has all but disappeared. The all-night greasy-spoon cafeterias, the fleapit porno theaters, the street-walker-infested Times Square: all of these features of the movie’s blotchy nightmare landscape—of which its “hero” says “Some day a real rain’ll come and wash all the scum away”—are gone. A would-be avenging angel like Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle would have to look long and hard to find stimulation for his particular psychoses in the Disneyfied environs of today’s tourist-friendly Manhattan. Instead of “rescuing” an underage prostitute from her skeevy pimp, as happens in the movie, he’d more likely end up punching out a rude guy in an Elmo costume.

Despite its depiction of a world that now looks a little like Mars to us—and yes, this IS the city that old-school CBGB habitués actually claim to miss—Taxi Driver still packs a pretty hard wallop. The intensity and almost non-stop profanity of the dialogue, the discomfort of all the characters, the seedy specifics of its plot, such as it is—weird, lonely cabbie woos two women, one a sleek political volunteer (Cybill Shepherd), the other the aforementioned underage prostitute (Jodie Foster, turning 13 at the time of the film), and subsequently tries to kill both their bosses, succeeding (spoiler alert?) in only one case—make it a movie experience like no other. And that’s not even counting the amazing visual stylings of Martin Scorsese, who here directs with both a horror-movie immediacy and a sorrowful detachment that suggest a hybrid of Jean-Luc Godard and Mario Bava.

Travis Bickle is not so much played by the great Robert De Niro as he is incarnated by him. De Niro’s performance is an incredibly coherent rendering of what is in fact a very incoherent character. Travis can shift from cocky to catatonic in a single windshield-wiper swipe. This is in part because the character is a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of real-life traits from his creators: Bickle channels Scorsese’s pained loneliness, screenwriter Paul Schrader’s Dostoevsky-redolent mad-prophet rage, and De Niro’s intensity-in-isolation. Just as Pete Townshend had attempted to create a sociological/cultural portrait of his three band mates and their times in the ambitious 1973 sort-of rock opera Quadrophenia, so Taxi Driver presents, in Travis and his travels through the blasted hellscape of NYC, an imaginative portrait of its three main creators pushed to near-apocalyptic limits.

When I interviewed my friend, actor and two-time De Niro collaborator Edward Norton, for a recent book I wrote about De Niro and his work, Norton noted, “A lot of people think they like Taxi Driver because it’s this ‘cool’ movie about a vigilante, but they forget how totally oblique and weird that movie is. It is not the movie they think it is. It’s not nearly as friendly and accessible as their enjoyment in saying they like it has become.” It’s possible that this misreading of the movie has come from generations of viewers that have seen it cut up and extremely bowdlerized on commercial TV (or, as a pal and I used to call it, Scenes From ‘Taxi Driver’). To watch it whole, and in one sitting, is to go on a journey that’s still like no other; indeed, when speaking of his inspirations for the movie, Scorsese often cites the potentially narcotic effect of cinema, and the movie’s opening shot of the taxi coming through manhole-cover steam in slow-motion is like something out of a dream. As for reality, well, sometimes even today, if you’re unlucky enough to get spit out of the Port Authority at two in the morning on a weekend night, you can feel the New York of Taxi Driver murmuring under your feet, trying to get out from under the gratings, muttering “You talkin’ to me?”

[You can stream Taxi Driver on both Netflix and Amazon Prime]

THE DESCENDANTS OF TAXI DRIVER


BAD LIEUTENANT—New York filmmaker Abel Ferrara is kind of like Scorsese’s reprobate cousin (speaking strictly in terms of themes and sensibilities; I do not cast personal aspersions), and his jaw-dropping 1992 tale of a cop on the wrong side of the law (played by Harvey Keitel, the unforgettable pimp of Taxi Driver) is an audacious attempt to raise the urban-nightmare ante. [Where to stream Bad Lieutenant]

FIGHT CLUB—The phantasmagoric tale of mental illness, machismo, and urban anarchy is a meta-twisted Taxi Driver for a post-MTV age, with Edward Norton and Brad Pitt scoring career highs as secret sharers. [Where to stream Fight Club]

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD—The last movie from urban maestro Sidney Lumet, made in 2007, is also the last really convincing cinematic depiction of Good Old Bad New York. The late Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a junkie financier who gets high in a crystal-wreathed penthouse, while more casual brother Ethan Hawke would appear to conduct his risky business from one of the last extant Blarney Stones in town. Their worlds collide with predictably ill results. [Where to stream Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead]

Veteran (that is, old-ish) critic Glenn Kenny has written for oodles of publications and these days reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com. He blogs at Some Came Running and tweets (mostly in jest) at @glenn__kenny.

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[Photos: Everett Collection]