#26 Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver (Scorcese, 1976)

Taxi Driver, more than any other film, focuses on our basic revulsion to the every day horrors we're constantly exposed to. The main character is a maladjusted taxi driver in New York City who spends all day driving around seeing violence, drug use and prostitution. In his life he's isolated, out of touch with other human beings. He meets a woman who's involved with a presidential campaign and tries to connect with her, only to find after her initial curiousity she judges him just as harshly as everyone else does. Because of his lack of social sense and inability to conform, she lumps him in with all the street trash.

When we look for solutions for all the problems of society, we tend to look externally. Politicians ask us to invest all our hopes in them and expect them to perform miracles once elected, and we happily oblige them, not out of laziness so much as having no idea what else to do. So when the presidential candidate winds up in his cab and asks him how he would change things, all he can say is 'Take all the scum on the streets and flush it down the toilet'. The politician gives a typical hollow response, and he sees him for what he is: A lot of empty promises. After he runs into a twelve year old girl named Iris who ran away from home and was manipulated into being a prostitute and a man sits in his cab and tells him all about how he's going to kill his wife for sleeping with a black man, he finally snaps, buys a bunch of guns and trains to become a vigilante.

For a while it looks like he's going to kill the political candidate. He heads to one of his rallies and it looks like he's about to pull out a gun. Then when the secret service man spots him, he runs out and changes his mind. He goes down and kills the pimp and the two other men involved in exploiting Iris, and makes sure to give her a nice gruesome image to scare her into going back to her parents. Because it's not the lying politicians making empty promises who deserve to die; it's the scumbags out there on the street corrupting innocent lives.

After committing this triple murder, he expects to be sent to jail, but instead he's hailed as a hero for rescuing the girl. Because he did what the rest of us secretly wish we could do: He didn't wait for some politician to wave a magic wand and make everythinig better, he went and cleaned up the streets himself. (Does anyone question that 'Sport', the pimp, deserved his fate?)

Taxi Driver is one of those films where the staging techniques are absolutely perfect to bring out the feeling of alienation and powerlessness, but also target our basic human sympathy. Our basic desire to just help somebody who badly needs it. It would probably be on my all time top ten list.

Rating: ***** / 5

22/101