Taxi Driver

To commemorate the release of Taxi Driver on a downright essential Blu-Ray, I've reviewed the film at Cinelogue. Almost assuredly my favorite movie of the 1970s, Taxi Driver hasn't aged a day regardless of the vastly different condition of modern New York City. This is a film for the lonely, the hurt and the angry, which makes it as good a fit for millennials as it did the post-hippie burnouts.

I only briefly touched upon the extras included in the Blu-Ray, but everything you need to know about the movie can be found in its commentary track or the bevy of retrospective material. The A/V restoration makes the film come alive more than it already does, yet this gorgeous transfer does not take away from the dingy feel of the movie. It is already my to-beat disc for 2011.

You can read my review now at Cinelogue.

Taxi Driver

Though I've traveled abroad several times, I've only ever been to New York City once, and only for a three day high school band trip at that. Before I went, I made the mistake of re-watching Taxi Driver, one of my all-time favorite films. Why a mistake? For someone who had no idea what the Guiliani administration meant beyond September 11, my only knowledge of the city came from Scorsese's oeuvre, of mean streets and the good fellas who roamed them. Watching Travis Bickle's descent into madness amidst a dank, dripping den of fetid urban decay terrified me as deeply as it did the first time, though I still did not fully understand it at the time. Of course, now New York has been literally Disney-fied, the homeless swept out of sight and the streets so clean and vibrant that the whole damn place feels like an arty theme park.

It's such a stunning transformation that Taxi Driver now plays as a period piece, one not of nostalgia or revisionism but of paranoid horror. The streets, always wet to better reflect the lighting, look perversely filthier in the presence of water. That water does not cleanse but rests on top of the roads and sidewalks, as if the entire city were made of oil. As shocking and alienating as the film is, this style will make you believe that the city is indeed little more than a repository for scum, as Bickle says.

An honorably discharged Marine who served in Vietnam, Bickle applies his titular job because his insomnia keeps him up at nights riding buses and cabs to calm him, so why not get paid for it? Initially awkward but endearingly goofy, Travis' narrations betray a conflicted soul, one who sees the hopelessness of this city's downfall, one customer at a time. He gets along well enough with his fellow cabbies (look for the late, great Peter Boyle as the sage driver "Wizard"), his demeanor changes in the presence of black people. With unsettling slow-motion tracking shots, we see Travis shift from a grinning buddy to a visibly enraged racist, and his internal rants on the "scum" of the streets turns from a catch-all condemnation to a byword for blacks.

One person in the city catches his eye, however, a white-clad woman who strides through this town untainted by its influence. Without ever getting within a five-foot distance, Travis falls in love. Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) volunteers for the presidential campaign of Senator Charles Palantine (Lenoard Harris), and she notices Bickle spying on her. He finally musters up the courage to ask her out, and she finds his creepiness odd but intriguing, so she agrees, only for the socially inept Travis to take her to a porno film.

Understandably off-put, Betsy leaves, and a dejected Travis, who'd pinned all his optimism for the city's future on her, sinks into a full schizophrenic rage. He purchases a number of firearms and begins training himself for... something. Without a reason to acclimate into society, it's only a matter of time until Travis fully goes off the deep end. He finds his catalyst in Iris (Jodie Foster), a pre-teen prostitute bossed around by her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel).

Both Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader cop to Taxi Driver being an urban remake of the John Ford masterpiece The Searchers, and twisted parallels to Westerns are numerous. The hero of the Western is always an outsider, someone who enters into society only long enough to cleanse it of its corruption or to defend it from attackers. Travis, a Vietnam veteran moves to New York to readjust to society, yet he soon finds he cannot. His idea of cleaning the streets reflects the Western philosophy of the gun, which dictates that the only degrees of justice are the caliber of your bullets. Scorsese and Schrader see through the fabricated nobility of these men and paint Bickle as a sociopath, one who perhaps has the right idea when he sees New York as an amoral wasteland, a modern Sodom, but his decision to take a gun into the streets to right the wrongs are insane. Alan Moore took a cue from the film when he applied the same revisionism to the comic book genre with Watchmen, in which the heroes are all uniformly unbalanced.

Later, he sports that infamous mohawk, a sign of his descent by way of a Native American haircut. Sport wears an Indian headband, so he becomes the Injun chief, and Travis must become savage like the tribe (in movie terms, obviously, not reality) to break into to save Iris. Iris recalls Ethan's kidnapped niece in The Searchers, though, unlike Ethan, Travis never expresses a desire to kill her for being "tainted."

Travis' third and final fixation is the politician, Palantine. By random chance, the senator winds up in Travis' cab near the beginning, and Bickle talks to him about cleaning the streets. Palantine tosses off glib bits of assertion while looking thoroughly uncomfortable in the cab of someone who even claims to be a supporter. Bickle notes this, and when he snaps after Betsy's rejection, he comes to view Palantine as the enabler who allows the city, the country, to decay. His plot to assassinate the politician, however, is the one hurdle of the film; as the film occurs from Travis' demented POV, it's hard to tell what motivates him to equate killing Palantine with saving Iris, or why he would shave his head and make him more noticeable. Occam's razor would say to just accept that he's crazy and move on, and that may be best. What I decided on this viewing was that because Travis saw the senator as the force that allowed the scum to thrive, killing him might wake up the populace to the stench around them.

I also believe that he would have tried to go after Sport and save Iris himself even if he had managed to kill Palantine. Obviously he would have been stopped there and then, but going after the senator first gave him a chance to fix the overwhelming problems which could trickle down and free Iris, while the Plan B attack on the pimps at least ensures that he can free one person. The final shootout is a thing of savage beauty, shot to perfection by Scorsese and edited with just the right frantic rhythm by Tom Rolf and Melvin Shapiro. Scorsese desaturated the color timing to pass the film with an R rating, but that, funnily enough, makes it all more disturbing as it lacks the softness of '70s color stock. It culminates with a remarkable overhead shot that tracks the aftermath of Bickle's rampage through the seedy hotel, which some have interpreted as Bickle's soul leaving his body.

I do not believe the epilogue, though, is his dying fever vision. Bickle recovers from the attack and is propped up by the media as a hero. Even Palantine hoists him up as an example of the people taking charge and blah blah blah. I think this redemptive coda gives the film an ironic twist as well as a point; if this is merely Travis' last thought, then the movie is nothing more than the profile of a psycho. If it is real, then it reveals America's return to conservatism that built to a head with Reagan's election. For the media to set up a psychotic as a folk hero for slaying a -- to be honest -- relatively nonviolent pimp and a corrupt cop demonstrates a need for Americans to find concrete heroes and villains in the post-Vietnam world.

I also believe that the coda is real because of its last shot, which I finally understood with this viewing. When Travis gets back to his job, Betsy rides in his cab one night. Maybe caught up in the notion that Travis is noble, maybe just wanting to hook up with a celebrity, she attempts to re-open their relationship, but Bickle simply drops her off and doesn't make her pay. As he looks at her in the rear view mirror, suddenly he notices something and tilts the mirror, which only reflects him, not the object in question. The camera suddenly cuts with a jarring noise to capture Bickle and his reflection dominating the screen. What I see now (and don't know how I didn't see it before) is Bickle's total rejection of society. Where Betsy/the good of society rejected him before, now he can drive away from it. When he tilts the mirror to look for the unseen object, we see only him: Travis has descended into a fully insular world of paranoia now, and it's only a matter of time before he does something no one could mistake for heroic.

To call Taxi Driver a masterpiece is a waste of words. It was hailed as one upon its release, and even though it launched the career of the most impressive filmmaker working today, perhaps the most talented American director since Howard Hawks, it remains Scorsese's best film. I've not even mentioned De Niro's performance yet because I find it so unnecessary. To watch him in this film is to see pure madness, but not the moustache-twirling kind of more facile works. No, Bickle may be a genuinely decent fellow, but his mental instability turns him from an awkward, almost Office-like character into a terrifying construct. That endlessly parodied scene of him in front of the mirror asking, "You talking to me?" not only recalls yet more Western tropes (it's a straight lift from Shane) but reveals his schizophrenia and insanity.

Just recently I finally watched the last few Scorsese films I had yet to see. I came to the conclusion that, of his 20 narrative films, a good 10 were classics (about five or six are masterpieces), another five were highly watchable and the rest were merely good. It may be errant fanboyism, but I never disliked a single one of his films even when I failed to see the point of, say, the totally unnecessary The Color of Money (other than raising money for his most personal work, The Last Temptation of Christ, so it was kind of worth it). His ability to use his mastery of technique to get inside his protagonists' heads and flesh out his worlds, fusing style and substance seamlessly, makes his projects always worth seeing, and his restlessness and willingness to step far outside his comfort zone and fall on his face even today (I liked Kundun, so you can all shut it) is only outclassed in audacity by Jean-Luc Godard's irascibility. With Taxi Driver, he placed his camera in the mind of a madman and became trapped, and the result was one of the most thrilling pictures ever made.

The Silence of the Lambs

In my ongoing quest to grow the hell up and get over my childish fear of the horror genre-- though I believe most horror filmmakers would be delighted that I spent the first 17-18 years of my life desperately avoiding the genre-- I've been going through the classics and finding most of them to be too entertaining to frighten. When I watched Alien about a year and a half ago, it served as my gateway into the genre, a beautifully crafted example of how a gifted filmmaker could actually get scares out of something other than things popping in front of the screen (though there's plenty of that). Well, after slowly working my way through some of the more notable names, I've finally gotten to The Silence of the Lambs, the horror thriller renowned for giving us what, for many, is the greatest screen villain of all time.

I became less eager to see this film a while back when I heard Lecter only shows up for 16 minutes of screen time, and I'd seen at least half that on any TV show that mentions him. However, having watched it, I agree that Anthony Hopkins' performance is justly famous. The film is about Clarice Starling, and the villain is Buffalo Bill, but Hopkins walks away with the show. His Lecter is mannered, erudite and fiercely intelligent, which makes it all the more shocking when he suddenly reaches out to eat someone's face.

His performance is so good that it sadly overshadows the excellent work put in by both Jodie Foster and Ted Levine. Foster plays Clarice Starling as a cauldron of insecurities and trauma simmering under a collected yet clearly nervous exterior. At the start of the film she's in training to become an FBI agent and, for reasons that somewhat escape me, her boss Crawford sends her to interview the infamous, cannibalistic psychologist Hannibal Lecter in order to gain some information on a serial killer known only as 'Buffalo Bill.' Before she leaves, Crawford warns her "Don't let him inside your head."

She visits Lector's maximum security cell and, of course, immediately lets him inside her head. But he does not do so because Starling is some bubbly fool like most horror females; instead, we see how he uses his psychological knowledge to weaken and destroy his victims. The scene is less an insult to Clarice as it is a testament to Lecter's fearsome reputation. After all, with 16 minutes of face time, you have to hook the audience fast.

The two enter into a sort of a waltz; Lecter speaks in cryptic riddles and slowly extracts pieces of Starling's past and persona, while Starling solves his misleading advice. Starling uses that nugget of information, then the process starts again. You get a sense from Lecter that he's almost proud of Starling; after all, he got into her head early and stayed there, but she never backed down and she's learning enough about him to figure out his lies.

Demme cranks up the thrills as the film goes on. Buffalo Bill, a wannabe transsexual who, instead of elective surgery, has chosen to kill women and piece together a suit out of their skins, captures a senator's daughter, suddenly putting even more pressure on the Feds. Meanwhile Lecter stages a bold escape attempt, and at some point the psychological drama kicks into action overdrive. Eventually, Clarice finds Buffalo Bill, and it plays out in moments of incredible suspense aided by Craig McKay's skillful editing.

Overall, I found the film to be taut and intelligent. Though people always refer to it as a horror, I don't know if I'd call it one. A thriller certainly, but just because there's a cannibal and a killer doesn't make it a horror film. Then again, true horror stems from suspense, I think; I derive much more visceral terror from, say, North By Northwest than I do The Exorcist. The Silence of the Lambs isn't perfect, but it boast stellar acting, great writing and great direction, and I imagine it'll entertain audiences for generations to come.