Movies: Taxi Driver and Mean Streets

These two Scorsese films were on the long list of classics that I've never seen, thanks to a) my relative youth (I was negative six and negative nine years of age, respectively) and b) my parents' negligence (we didn't have a VCR, didn't go to the movies, and didn't watch movies on television, either). I suppose I am partially to blame too, for not having a television of my own; otherwise, I could have Netflixed a long list by now. My point is that, having heard so much for so long about Taxi Driver (not really much about Mean Streets), I had some grand expectations. I am sorry to say that they were dashed.

Taxi Driver features, of course, Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a surprisingly Holden Caufield-like character who lives in a dirty one room apartment and sleeps on a cot. Suffering from insomnia, he takes a job driving a yellow cab during the night shift—sometimes for 12 hour stints—and spends the rest of his time watching dirty movies in Times Square and sitting at home, journaling with a stubby pencil. His life is simultaneously pulpy and precious. He nurses a disgust for the filth of the streets ('76 was a bad time for New York, and Scorsese shows us the pushers, pimps, and peepshows in all of their seedy glory) and a desire for the lofty Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a blonde campaign manager working for a Senator running for President, who in her airy dresses and pearls constantly made me think of marshmallow fluff. Travis' diary is at its most tender and poignantly (embarrassingly?) real when he describes Betsy as she wafts down the street: "Out of this filthy mess, she is alone. They cannot touch her."

Unfortunately, Travis cannot touch her, either. He makes a valiant effort, taking her to the diner where he orders coffee and apple pie with a piece of melted cheese, remarking in his journal, "I thought it was a good choice," and that she had fruit salad, but "she could have had anything she wanted." These, I am certain, are the best lines of the movie, richly revealing in their arbitrary simplicity. For their next date, though, Travis, seeming to not know better, takes Betsy to a dirty movie, and she realizes that his oddity is as dangerous as it is charming. She refuses to see him again. With a newly developed rage, Travis buys a small collection of automatic weapons and begins doing push-ups and pull-ups in his dirty hovel. He also cuts his hair into a mohawk. He tapes a knife to his boot, builds a sliding apparatus that enables him to have his gun in his hand with the flick of his wrist, and straps two holsters over his chest, practicing the speed of his draw. We worry that his aim is to commit an act of murder, or perhaps an act of terror, when he shows up at a rally for Betsy's Senator and starts up a conversation with one of the secret service members. Perhaps that is his intention, but he gets a fright and runs away.

Killing is in the cards, though. Travis has had a few run-ins with a young prostitute (a surprisingly unimpressive Jodie Foster) who goes by the name of Easy. She is Sunny to his Holden, and he is bent on saving her. And, because it's 1976, he does. He goes to the flophouse where she works, and accosts her pimp/lover at the door; he gets a bullet in the belly. There's a lot more gunfire inside, as thugs previously seen and unseen come out of the rotting staircase like so many cockroaches, until everyone ends up in Easy's own room, where she's splattered with blood from numerous bodies. Travis has been shot, and he closes his eyes as the screen goes black, Easy cowering in the corner. The screen comes back up again to show a number of news clippings tacked up on a wall; the describe a valorous young taxi driver who has rescued a young girl from a ring of pimps and restored her to her loving parents. Scorsese then provides us with a long missive from said parents, thanking Travis and apologizing for not visiting him in the hospital.

De Niro's performance is generally touching (and his character's odd combination of awe and rage reminds me of someone I once knew, making it particularly poignant), but that aside, I am mostly uncertain as to the great praise the film has garnered over the years. There is no question that Bernard Hermann composed the perfect score for the yellow cab's lurch through dark, wet streets, streaked with the lights of lowbrow eateries and theatres, but those two talents aside, I am not moved. Shepherd is, for me, the epitome of the 1980s' fluff, and Foster's gravelly voice and tough, ugly charm has never charmed me. The scenes meander, and then suddenly shift. The ending is too soft, and feels tacked-on; the film should have closed with Travis' eyes, never telling us whether he lived, and never telling us what happened to his whore. That's what life is actually like, and for a film so intent on conveying the real grit of human existence, that's what I would expect.

If Taxi Driver's plot is random, Mean Street's is a disaster area. It seems Scorsese took a bunch of guys, threw them in a paper bag, shook them around for awhile to see what happened, and that was the movie. Basically, there's a group of some Italian mafia types that hang around this one bar and this one restaurant, and they are all either close friends or relatives. Harvey Keitel, the pimp from Taxi Driver, is Charlie, a young up-and-coming-type mobster, who is trying to keep things in order without getting any negative attention from his uncle, who seems to be the big boss. Unfortunately, he is also in love with his epileptic neighbor, which relationship, for reasons never disclosed, must be kept secret, as the family would be against it. His bigger trouble is her cousin, Johnny Boy (brilliantly portrayed by Robert De Niro), who owes a lot of people a lot of money and clearly has no intention of ever paying it back. Johnny Boy has more than a few screws loose, and he blows up a mailbox in the opening credits, starts a number of brawls throughout the middle of the film, and stands on a roof shooting a gun at random into the streets at the movie's climax. He is the only interesting character amongst a menagerie of small-potatoes Italians working the seamy underside of the city. I don't remember if the movie had an ending; it certainly didn't have much of a beginning or a middle. I just remember jumping up out of my seat as the credits began to roll, lusting after the subway ride home, which promised to be far more interesting than the 110 minutes to which I had just subjected myself.

Having seen The Departed, I can't doubt Scorsese's genius, but these early films have tweaked my opinion. It's odd that some filmmakers, like Woody Allen, seem to get worse as they go along, while others, like Scorsese, get better.