Taxi Driver (1976) Review
9/10
This is a film I return to every few years and find worse each time. That’s the intended effect and the reason it’s great.
Paul Schrader wrote it while living in his car, recently divorced, barely sleeping, drinking, convinced the world had gone irredeemably rotten. He’s said he was closer to Travis than he was comfortable admitting, and that origin is the method. Travis Bickle is a psychology rendered from the inside, whole, by somebody who could reach it.
Scorsese was thirty-three and had just made Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. It’s a warm film about a woman rebuilding a life. Then he made this.
The 9 is for the discipline. There’s not one scene shot from outside Travis’s perception, not one moment where the film steps back to reassure you that it knows he’s unwell. Scorsese and Schrader hold the position for two hours and never break it. The small amount of the film that’s dated is period detail instead of technique, and the one point I withhold is for a third act that tips slightly further into style than the preceding ninety minutes justified.
The Narration That Sounds Reasonable
Travis keeps a diary and reads it to us in voiceover. Every individual entry is coherent. He’s concerned about the state of the city, worried about his health, trying to improve himself, disgusted by what he sees on his shift. Taken one at a time these are the observations of a lonely man with a point.
The horror is cumulative. The entries don’t become crazier as the film goes on, they simply accumulate until you notice the shape they make, and the shape is a man building a case for something he hasn’t admitted to himself yet.
The gap is never one of fact. Travis reports what he sees accurately. There really are pimps on those corners. The city really is filthy in 1976, and New York in that period was closer to collapse than most people now remember. What’s wrong is the interpretation, and interpretation is invisible from the inside.
The line about a real rain coming to wash the streets clean is the giveaway, and it arrives early. It sounds like disgust. It’s a plan.
What makes the voiceover technically clever is that Schrader gives Travis a slightly formal, self-improving tone, the prose of a man who has read some things and wants to sound serious. The stiffness is the character. A more natural voice would have been less frightening because it would have sounded less rehearsed. By the time the diary entries turn explicitly toward violence, the audience has spent an hour agreeing with the premises.
That hour of agreeing is what I find hardest to shake. I catch myself nodding along with Travis about the filth and the noise, and then the film lets me notice I’ve been nodding along with a man talking himself toward violence. Schrader never lets me off that hook, and I think the diary is the best writing in the picture.
This is the hardest version of an unreliable narrator and the most effective. The narrator who lies is a puzzle, and the reader’s job is to catch them out. The narrator who reports accurately and understands wrongly is a portrait, and the reader’s job is to notice the difference between what’s described and what it means.
Don’t have your character misstate facts. Have them state facts correctly and draw a conclusion the reader can see is deranged, then give them the vocabulary of a reasonable person to do it in.
The practical difficulty is that you have to write the wrong conclusion without editorializing, and the temptation is to plant a signal so the reader knows you know.
Resist it. Every wink is a place where the reader stops thinking for themselves, and the effect comes from the gap between their judgment and the narrator’s. The test on your own draft is to read the narrator’s reasoning as though you agreed with it: if you wrote a sentence to be visibly unhinged, cut it, because the frightening version is the one that would pass unremarked in a bar.
The Isolation Is Technique, Not Theme
Everything is built to keep you inside. The slowed tracking shots that drift away when Travis isn’t looking at anything in particular, most famously the camera leaving him at the payphone during the call with Betsy because the rejection is too much to watch directly.
Bernard Herrmann’s score, his last. He died on Christmas Eve 1975, hours after completing the final recording session. It alternates a romantic saxophone line with something percussive and wrong underneath, and the two never resolve into each other. That’s the character in music: a man with a sentimental idea of himself and a mechanism running beneath it.
Conversations are staged so that Travis is looking at people who are looking somewhere else.
The scene with Wizard outside the diner is the clearest example. Travis asks for help, obliquely, and Wizard gives him a rambling non-answer about doing what you do, and Travis accepts it because he has no way to ask a real question. I think it’s the saddest scene in the film, and the kindness in Wizard’s rambling makes it worse.
The famous mirror scene works because there’s nobody in the room. Travis is rehearsing a confrontation with an imagined person, and De Niro improvised it, and it’s the moment the film stops being about a lonely man and becomes about a man constructing an enemy.
The city is photographed as steam, neon and other people’s business. Travis drives through all of it every night and never once enters it. The taxi is the perfect device for this, because it puts him inside every part of the city and connected to none of it. Even the daylight scenes feel like night. Michael Chapman shot the film in a persistent haze, and the effect is that the whole picture takes place at one continuous unpleasant hour.
Writers usually write isolation as a stated condition, a character reflecting on being alone. It works better as a set of technical choices the reader absorbs without noticing: who your character is looking at, whether anybody answers the question that was really asked, what the surroundings are doing while they speak. If your character has said out loud that they’re lonely, you’ve probably skipped the work that would have made the reader feel it.
The most transferable device here is the unanswered question.
Travis asks Wizard for help, gets a non-answer and accepts it, and that exchange does more than a chapter of interior monologue would. The other person simply didn’t hear what was being asked. Try it on purpose: have your character ask something oblique, have the other answer the surface of it, and let nobody notice. Repeat it with different people across a book and the reader feels somebody sealed off without you ever saying so.
Betsy, Iris and the Two Rescues
Travis fixes on two women and the film is precise that both are projects instead of people.
Betsy is a campaign worker, competent and slightly bored, and she’s initially interested in him because he’s strange and direct. That interest is real.
Most accounts of the film miss it. She goes on the date. The film gives him a real opening and he destroys it by taking her to a pornographic cinema, not out of malice but because he’s no model of what other people find acceptable.
What follows is the most devastating stretch in the picture. He sends flowers she won’t accept, calls repeatedly, and then converts her into a symbol of everything cold and complicit. The rejection doesn’t make him violent. It removes the last person who might have interrupted the trajectory.
Iris is twelve, and Jodie Foster was twelve when she played her, with her older sister used as a body double for the more difficult material and a welfare officer on set throughout. The scene where Travis takes her to breakfast and tries to talk her into leaving is among the best-written exchanges in the film, because she’s more articulate about her situation than he is about his.
She doesn’t want rescuing, or at least not by him, and says so. He proceeds anyway. The film is explicit that the massacre is about Travis and not about her. That’s what separates it from every vigilante picture that copied its surface. Sport, the pimp played by Keitel, is written without any of the usual signals. He’s affectionate with Iris, gentle in the slow-dance scene, and the film refuses to make him a monster. That makes him considerably worse.
Keitel’s Sport is the performance I’d point to for anyone who thinks they know this film. He’s so tender in that slow dance that it turns my stomach, and I think the film is braver for refusing him a single sneer.
Writers usually write a character who wants to save somebody as sympathetic by default, and the assumption is worth interrogating. Ask whether the person being saved asked.
Ask what the rescuer gets from it. Travis needs Iris to need rescuing more than she needs to be rescued, and the film never states this once. Build the rescue so the reader can see whose need is being served.
The way to expose it without commentary is to let the person being rescued speak clearly.
Iris is more articulate about her own situation than Travis is about his, and she declines. That refusal converts the rescue from heroism into imposition and costs the film nothing but a page of dialogue. The failure mode is a rescued character written as passive or grateful. That retroactively justifies the rescuer and removes the question entirely. Give them their own assessment, let it be reasonable, and let your protagonist proceed anyway.
The Ending Nobody Agrees On
Travis survives the massacre, is written up in the papers as a hero, receives a grateful letter from Iris’s parents, and goes back to driving a cab. Betsy gets in. He’s pleasant, doesn’t take her money, drives away, and the camera drifts up to his eyes in the mirror before cutting hard to the street as though something has gone wrong with the picture.
The reading that the whole coda is a dying fantasy has been available since 1976. Scorsese and Schrader have both declined to settle it, and Schrader has said different things at different times, which I take as deliberate.
What matters is that both readings indict the same thing. If it happened, then a society that couldn’t see Travis coming has now decorated him, and the newspaper clippings on his wall are the same wall the noticeboard of his diary was written against. If it didn’t happen, then a man died inside the story he’d told himself. That’s the only ending in which he gets what he wanted.
That final camera drift is the only moment the film breaks its own discipline, and it breaks it to tell you the discipline was the point.
One more thing the film doesn’t do. There’s no scene of Travis being treated, no explanation of his war service beyond a marine discharge on a form, no diagnosis and no cause. He’s not a Vietnam parable, though he’s often read as one, and the absence of explanation keeps him disturbing.
What It Cost to Get Made
The final shootout was desaturated in post-production to reduce the red of the blood, because the film was heading for an X rating and Scorsese needed the violence to read as less vivid. He’s said he prefers the muted version and considers the compromise an improvement. That’s a rare admission.
Columbia didn’t want it. The budget was under two million dollars and De Niro took a fraction of his rate because he wanted the part, having just won an Academy Award for The Godfather Part II.
Then in 1981 John Hinckley Jr. shot at President Reagan, having become obsessed with Jodie Foster and with this film. Schrader and Scorsese have both spoken about what that was like, and it’s the single clearest case in film history of somebody misreading a picture entirely and then acting on the misreading.
That’s worth thinking about, because the film’s whole argument is that Travis is wrong and that nobody around him can tell. A viewer who watches it and finds Travis admirable has shown the thesis instead of refuted it.
It’s never been out of circulation since, appears on every serious list, and is now studied more than it is watched. That’s a slight shame. It plays better than its reputation suggests. It’s not slow, it’s not obscure, and it’s considerably funnier in places than people remember.
Should you watch Taxi Driver?
Yes, and more than once, at intervals. It rewards distance in an unusual way, because the older you get the less romantic Travis becomes and the more clearly you see what the film is doing with him. It’s a 9 for me because Scorsese and Schrader hold Travis’s point of view for two hours without flinching, and I dock the last point for a finale that leans harder on style than the first ninety minutes earned. Expect it to be less exciting and more upsetting than its reputation prepares you for.
