TAXI DRIVER

dMYD DVD
Starring Robert De Niro

D

Ambiguity is a confusing thing. You’re never going to watch Forest Gump and label him a closet racist, or take Nightmare on Elm Street as a treatise on the Falklands War, though this would make both of them infinitely more interesting. ‘AND AH MISS YOU GINNY’ takes on a whole new meaning. Taxi Driver is so well painted and open to interpretation that it’s a completely different film depending on what sort of person you are and crucially what sort of person you think Travis Bickle is, if a person at all. Horror, war film, romance, tragic-comedy… though shot through with violence and beauty, it increasingly falls to De Niro’s performance as to how you view the piece, with him sometimes seeming a babbling pervert and others a clear-headed voice of old fashioned reason in a hopelessly confused shit-world. Watching it nowadays it all feels like a modern fairy tale, the endless streams of headlights and dive-theater signs creating an eerie otherworld of gothic castles and helpless virgins, with Bickle as the courageous knight strolling through searching for someone to save. His disgust with the world around him seems particularly noble in light of society’s recent acceptance of some of the film’s harsher themes, whilst the tiny glimpses of hope that blink through all seem to stem from his dedication to simple common sense. Of course, you might watch it and think that he’s a sick-inducing sociopath with a racist haircut and firearm addiction, like everyone else in America. But you’d be wrong. Or right, or something. Good film, clever film.