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TAXI DRIVER: LIMITED COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Directed by: Martin Scorsese.
Produced by: Michael Phillips & Julia Phillips.
Written by: Paul Schrader.
Director of Photography: Michael Chapman.
Edited by: Marcia Lucas, Tom Rolf & Melvin Shapiro.
Music by: Bernard Herrmann.
Released by: Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Country of Origin: USA. 114 min. Rated R.
With: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel, Leonard Harris, Peter Boyle & Cybill Shepherd.

DVD Features: Two-disc set. Disc 1: Commentary by writer Paul Schrader. Audio commentary by Professor Robert Kolker. Original screenplay read-along. English, Spanish & French subtitles. English & French audio. Previews.
Disc 2: “Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver,” “Producing Taxi Driver,” “Travis’ New York,” “Taxi Driver Stories” & “Travis’ New York Locations” featurettes. “God’s Lonely Man,” “Influence and Appreciation” & making-of documentaries. Storyboard to film comparisons with Martin Scorsese introduction. Animated photo galleries. English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese & Korean subtitles.

This 1976 film has come to define a public discontent characteristic of its era. It not just profoundly taps into the angst-filled disillusionment of the socially paranoid “silent majority,” but does so in an extremely artful way. For a work hailed as unconventional, the movie subtly utilizes cinematic genre tropes to a remarkable degree. This is perhaps best attested by how many times its basic framework of the “psychopathic loner” has been adapted since, not least of all by De Niro himself, who for a while was virtually typecast in roles drawing on the traits of Travis Bickle, the iconic title character.

With its enigmatic opening of a taxicab emerging out of smoke, it’s uncertain at times what’s real in the film, given that, in the very beginning, Travis – a Vietnam vet – is shown applying for the job of a driver (so the earlier moment may have been imagined or even foreshadowing the end). The introductory cab sequence casts Travis in a role almost like a cowboy riding in to clean up the town. He obsessively compares the city to “an open sewer,” and initially even tells his prospective boss that his driving record is as “clean” as his conscience. As Paul Schrader’s script proceeds, Travis’s individualistic streak is aggravated by the impotent authorities supposed to keep law and order, another Western element. However, Scorsese’s direction complicates this, depicting Travis as contradictorily (even hypocritically) wanting to join society by his wooing of and eventually being discarded by presidential campaign worker Betsy (a luminous Cybill Shepherd).

Travis’s anger then rises (there’s a shot of a bubbling glass of Alka-Seltzer) and spills over when he fixates on a child prostitute, Iris (a superb Jodie Foster), whom he decides to rescue (shades of The Searchers), all part of his succumbing to madness culminating in a bloodbath, followed by a coda where the media ironically posits Travis’s act as one of salvation. The ambiguity of the last scenes (is Travis hallucinating all this?) powerfully evokes the viewer’s overall ambivalence toward Travis.

DVD Extras: The making-of doc (over an hour long and featuring interviews with the actors – an element missing from the other bonuses) was part of an earlier DVD edition, but the newer, shorter extras are illuminating – if, in Scorsese and Schrader’s case, repetitive. Despite this, interview segments with Scorsese clarify the influences on his film (Fassbinder and Godard) and how he sought to revitalize genres such as film noir. Though his introduction to the storyboard/film comparison looks inside his filmmaking process, the other featurettes are largely novelties (the one on NYC cabdrivers is notable only for how its subjects constantly invoke the film to illustrate their points).

While much of Schrader’s commentary is redundant given the other features (though he shrewdly concedes that at times the script telegraphs its ideas), author Robert Kolker provides a great wealth of analysis on Scorsese’s Hitchcockian influences, off-kilter camera techniques, and editing effects. Reymond Levy
August 14, 2007