Taxi Driver: Still dangerous, still remarkable 40 years later

Harvey Keitel (left to right), Michael Phillips, Paul Schrader, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, and Kent Jones gathered for a 40th anniversary screening of Taxi Driver at the Tribeca Film Festival. (photo credit: Getty Images)

The day Taxi Driver opened, Feb. 8, 1976, screenwriter Paul Schrader went to a theater across town and saw a line around the corner still as the first showing was to begin. He worried something had gone wrong with the projector or, god forbid, the print. He asked the girl working at the theater what all those people were doing there. She told him they were here for Taxi Driver. He asked if it had not already started, and she said they were lined up for the next showing.

“I walked up [into] the theater,” said Schrader. “It was the very first screening in New York, and the cab pulls out of the steam, and it says ‘Taxi Driver,’ and people in the audience applaud. The film had never been projected before. It was some kind of New York groundswell that just was there.”

To this story, director Martin Scorsese responded: “Incredible. I had no idea. None.”

The scene outside the Beacon Theatre

So went the 40th anniversary screening of Taxi Driver at the Beacon Theatre on the Upper-West Side of Manhattan. Robert De Niro pulled together a reunion of the filmmakers behind the cinematic classic as one of the centerpieces of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which he co-founded. Onstage were Scorsese, De Niro, Schrader, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, producer Michael Phillips, and moderator Kent Jones, who is program director of the New York Film Festival.

The overwhelming feeling of the moment was awe – from an audience with a group of legendary actors and filmmakers assembled before them and from those onstage who still seemed stunned their little film found any success at all.

“What I saw [in the script], I can’t articulate,” said Scorsese. “It just had to be done, that’s all. I think Bob and I, we never really spoke about meaning or theory of any kind. Paul is the one who expresses it. I just had a kind of determination to make it, and I said earlier, I didn’t think it was a film that anybody was going to see. I felt it was just made out of the passion of the situation.”

That passion drips down the screen. It explodes out of the speakers. It demands your attention even when the only thing on screen is an empty hallway, one of the film’s many signature shots. On the big screen, the steam seems to pour out into the theater, and characters that have become larger than life through pop culture and critical appreciation feel more real but still larger than life. This is how this film was meant to be seen – in a packed house with that gorgeous yet ominous Bernard Herrmann score booming throughout the auditorium.

“It’s part of being in the city at night in the summer,” said Scorsese. “You can feel it in the film, Michael Chapman’s photography. You can get a sense of – you can taste – you can taste the humidity, and you can taste the sense of sometimes a kind of anger and violence that was emanating from the streets themselves. It was crazy.”

The city is nothing like that anymore. One imagines that is for the best. The world Taxi Driver depicts feels divorced from reality, like a metaphor for something darker in the human experiment, and it is those things, too, but to a person, the filmmakers assured us life in the city was like that and that people like Travis Bickle and worse were all around.

“When I read it, I identified with it, as I think we all did,” said De Niro. “Even though Marty’s from the heart of New York, I’m from the heart of New York, not far from each other in Manhattan, we just identified with the character.”

Ultimately, the character is the film, as is De Niro’s remarkable, terrifying performance. Pop culture, in some ways, has reduced Travis to a Mohawk and “Are you talkin’ to me?” However, when you see the performance again, in its proper context, it is hard to imagine a more thorough examination of psychosis, of a man on the brink of madness, capable of committing any number of terrible acts, and just waiting for the moment to strike.

“This script began in the best possible way,” said Schrader. “It began as a kind of self-therapy. There was a person who I was afraid of, who I was afraid of becoming, and that person was the taxi driver, and I felt like if I wrote about him, I could distance him from me, and it worked. … After 40 years, that therapeutic power is still imbued in the film.”

A film written as therapy, made out of necessity, depicting a hellscape at the heart of the American soul, one understands the filmmakers’ bafflement at its success. When it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, Scorsese got wind the jury president, Tennessee Williams, was not a fan. Believing they had no chance to win, Scorsese and the cast did their required interviews and promotions, got on a plane, and came back home.

Phillips stayed behind to represent the film just in case. Well, just in case arrived and the film was announced as the winner of the Palme d’Or, the highest award of the festival and one of the highest honors in all filmmaking. To his shock, Phillips said, when he went onstage to accept the award, half the audience celebrated. The other half booed. After Phillips told the story, Scorsese just shook his head.

Jones, attempting to save the evening from that somewhat downer ending, offered: “Well, the film got the last laugh.”

With that, the assembled legends stood, clasped hands, and took a bow. Forty years and an ocean away from that divided audience in Cannes, hundreds of film lovers had gathered to show their appreciation for a work of pure genius. As the wild cheers of a grateful crowd echoed through the room, the truth was plain for anyone to see. Yeah, the film got the last laugh.

New movie review: Youth

Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel star in writer-director Paolo Sorrentino's Youth.

Two years ago, filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino wrote and directed the Academy Award-winning The Great Beauty. Every element of that film, right down to its plot, owed a debt to Italian master Federico Fellini. In both style and substance, it was a direct riff on the classic La Dolce Vita. As such, it was a remarkably successful film, tapping into the bombast and irreverent energy of that earlier work. Though it may not exactly have been an original idea, Sorrentino at least showed he had a point of view and certainly demonstrated a directorial flair.

Now, Sorrentino is back with Youth, which borrows from the same playbook but lacks the passion or commitment of either The Great Beauty or the films that so influenced him. Youth is stuffed to the gills with ideas and imagery, but the whole ultimately adds up to much less than the sum of its parts. Every time the film gets close to pinning down some deeper truth or meaning, Sorrentino backs away, seemingly less out of fear than preoccupation. He perhaps has too many thoughts to get out and cannot focus on just one at a time.

Michael Caine plays Fred Ballinger, an internationally famous composer, now long retired, who is on holiday at an exclusive spa in the Alps. He is something of a miser, failing to find joy in much of anything, and his doctors, friends, and family have diagnosed him as apathetic. He seems to feel that diagnosis is accurate and does everything he can to embrace it. He is joined at the resort by daughter/assistant Lena (Rachel Weisz), legendary filmmaker Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), up-and-coming actor Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano), and a whole cavalcade of grotesques.

Generally speaking, it is folly to compare two filmmakers’ work directly, but in every decision he makes, Sorrentino invites the comparison to Fellini. In fact, he seems to relish it. The cast of characters – or caricatures, depending on your point of view – he assembles for Youth seems culled straight from a casting session for one of Fellini’s more whimsical flights of fancy. In addition to the central group, there is an obese former soccer star, an older married couple who never speaks, the recently named Miss Universe, a few pop stars playing themselves, and a teenage prostitute, among others.

These people mostly hang around the edges of the story, and most of them hardly say a word. They provide color to a relatively staid central plot, but that color is meant to give the illusion of depth. In practice, Sorrentino never seems interested in exploring any of their inner lives and instead settles for the mere suggestion they have inner lives before shifting the focus back to our central four.

The plot such as it is revolves around an emissary from Queen Elizabeth II who tries to persuade Fred to conduct again for a special ceremony. He refuses for personal reasons, and the rest of the film ostensibly explores what those personal reasons could be. Mick and a group of young writers are putting the finishing touches on a screenplay for the movie Mick wants to be his legacy, while Jimmy is resting before going off to shoot a Serious Film – the capital letters are mine. Lena is waiting to go on a trip with her husband, who is also Mick’s son, but he leaves her for one of those pop stars I mentioned. She is thus left adrift emotionally and geographically, so she remains at the spa.

Rachel Weisz in Youth.

For a movie featuring fantastic leading performances from Caine and Keitel, Weisz is actually the standout. Given a lot less to play by the script, Weisz takes a fairly cliché character – the adult daughter still hurt over the way her father treated the family – and gives the role a memorable spin, providing the kind of strength and motivation lacking in many of the other characters.

Caine is still a force to be reckoned with onscreen, and Sorrentino does well to play off his lead’s public persona as a debonair man about town who does not really care what others think of him. As Fred, Caine is charming and off-putting in equal measure, and from an audience standpoint, he is just a lot of fun to watch. Keitel is great as well but with a far more problematic character. Sorrentino wants us to be a lot more interested in Mick’s supposed crowning achievement than he gives us any reason to be.

At its core, the film is about artists concerned with their legacies while confronting more immediate matters such as aging and ill health. Sorrentino draws explicit parallels between the younger Jimmy, who is best known for playing a robot in a dumb science-fiction movie and wishes people knew his more serious films, and the older Fred, whose best known compositions are his “Simple Songs,” though he has written more complex and impressive works.

In theory, such contradictions and concerns could be fertile ground for exploration, introspection, and character development, but again, Sorrentino does not seem interested in exploring. It is more like a survey of all the ways these characters might feel about their lives and legacies. The film never seems to have a specific view on any of the ideas it presents but rather meanders from story to story, haphazardly tripping over stray profound thoughts along the way.

It must be acknowledged, however, that in all this wandering, Sorrentino manages to find some beautiful imagery and stunning compositions. It is almost remarkable for a movie that wants so badly to be about the importance of substance over style just how flashy the filmmaking is and how empty its ideas are. The alpine vistas are obviously gorgeous, but even the interiors are given energy and interest by Sorrentino’s camera placements and shot choices. If only the story had generated as much intrigue, Youth really could have been something.

See it? No.