REVIEW: Here is a Man...

We are so close to France. I can almost taste the croissants.
__________________________________________________________________

Taxi Driver (1976): HERE IS A MAN...

Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) is a normal guy or, at least, he's trying to be. Not that he's really sure what it means to be a person like other people, but hey, E for Exterminating the Scum Effort, right?

From the get-go, Travis tries doing all the normal things people do. He gets a night job driving a cab and accepting seedy clientele, closely observes a girl volunteering for a campaign office, goes to the movies to see some XXX content, eats apple pie with a slice of cheese on top... but something just isn't clicking, and he can't explain why.

He thinks he sees something special in Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), Palantine enthusiast; she's lonely too, and he knows all about that. To soothe her pain, he invites her out, but when she stops taking his calls and he is forced to confront her at the office, he realizes that she is just like the rest of them.

Accompanied by a lonely sax calling out over the tumult of the city, Robert DeNiro draws us into Travis' life and reveals the rolling disappointments faced by a person struggling against the isolation that surrounds him. We see in Travis' character the desperation and disgust we often feel ourselves as we search for our place and purpose in the world, and though we could attempt to write him off as crazy and irrational, the straight-forwardness with which DeNiro portrays Travis leaves us with no other option but to confront the urges that we all face, with varying degree, to make our mark on humanity and change the world around us.

Travis' inability to connect with society fuels his need to eliminate the scum, the filth, the trash of urban culture and leads him to look for a scapegoat on whom to pin the problem. In his last and most dramatic rejection of society, he finally succeeds in catching the eyes and ears of the people who previously ignored him, but the veneration leaves him as lonely as he was before, if not more so.

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, though some may complain of the slow pacing, succeeds in its encompassing the depth and focus of the isolation that many of us face at crucial moments in our life, showing us that only in these crucial moments do we know exactly what kind of person we have become and how much we are willing to take. With Travis Bickle, here is a man who would not take it anymore.