My favourite Cannes winner: Taxi Driver

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/29/my-favourite-cannes-winner-taxi-driver

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Everyone has their angry young man phase. Mine came at around the same time as my budding cinephilia, so – at my worst – I may have intentionally neglected to rewind a VHS tape.

Has there ever been a better film for feeling like an outsider and thinking the whole world needs a redeemer than Taxi Driver? Some might say Fight Club or – worse – The Dark Knight, but some day a real rain will come and wash this scum off the internet.

Related: Martin Scorsese's remarkable Taxi Driver: from the archive, 19 August 1976

I got turned on to Martin Scorsese through twin gateway drugs. The anthology film New York Stories, featuring Scorsese’s Life Lessons, was in theatres and I went because I was a fan of Woody Allen, who contributed Oedipus Wrecks. This was just as Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which never played in central New Jersey, hit home video. At age 14 I rented it not so much for its nuanced take on theology, but because I was really into Peter Gabriel, who had scored the film. Then I got my hands on the rest: Mean Streets, Raging Bull and, importantly, Robert Phillip Kolker’s book about New Hollywood, A Cinema of Loneliness. Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle was on the cover, trudging through 1970s Times Square, a Monument Valley of porno theatres and all-round filth. I knew that Taxi Driver was the big one, the one that had to be censored, the one that nearly killed a president, and – important to a budding snob reading Cahiers du Cinéma on microfiche – it was the one that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Taxi Driver wasn’t the first New Hollywood picture to win the top prize at Cannes. Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation all got there first. But Taxi Driver felt like a bigger gamble. Indeed, the jury’s deliberation was said to be particularly contentious in 1976. During the festival, jury president Tennessee Williams (!) and the ecumenical jury issued a handwringing statement. They noted that the era had been “marked by serious films without hope, some of which reflected a violence seldom seen before. We are well aware that this violence and hopelessness reflect the image of our society. However, we fear that violence breeds violence and that, instead of being a denunciation, it leads our society to an escalation of violence. The jury … expresses its wish that the cinema not become a source of hatred.”

I came to Taxi Driver expecting sex, profanity and violence. There’s actually not much sex (indeed, if Travis wasn’t so uptight around women he’d maybe get a little action, and many of his problems would go away) but what I didn’t expect was for it to be so gorgeous. No matter how dangerous the movie gets, Bernard Herrmann’s music and Michael Chapman’s cinematography make the drive through Travis Bickle’s New York something like a ballet. Unlike Mean Streets’s Johnny Boy or Raging Bull’s Jake LaMotta, De Niro’s character is an observer, creeping past depravity, his windshield like a movie screen. Taxi Driver is violent and the subject matter is ugly, but the haze that emerges from the languid POV shots and the slow crescendos in Herrmann’s score turn the brutality into something of a dream. There are passages of pure cinema in Taxi Driver that Scorsese would later revisit in Raging Bull’s boxing matches, the montages of The Age of Innocence and the vistas of Kundun. We love Scorsese for his tight, kinetic sequences cut to Charlie Watts’s beats, but the man can sometimes be a painter too.

Related: Why we are locked in the back of Taxi Driver's mind

Urban loneliness was and perhaps still remains an under-discussed phenomenon. Add to this the stylised way Scorsese captured New York’s raw energy and you can see why it would knock a Cannes jury on its derrière. And French audiences certainly caught the homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her “coffee cup” moment. Though, to make it a little sour, Travis, who complains of headaches and worries about stomach cancer, trades café au lait for Alka Seltzer.

Taxi Driver ends in shocking violence, but the road it takes there earns it its right to dance over the line. In addition to the grace of its editing, there are moments of tremendous humour. Albert Brooks, whom you may have forgotten is in this, absolutely kills as the doofus office drone. It’s a catchphrase now, but the “You talkin’ to me” sequence of Travis preening in the mirror was, I believe, always meant to be a little bit light-hearted. Until we know exactly what he’s up to, riding passenger side with De Niro is, I’m not ashamed to admit it, a little bit fun.

As I get older, I’m less sure what I’m to make of Travis Bickle. In 2015 would he still work himself into a lather over a girl and try to assassinate a political candidate? Or would he just be screaming about ethics in games journalism on Twitter? Cybill Shepherd’s character, Betsy, describes Travis (whom she barely knows) by quoting Kris Kristofferson’s The Pilgrim, Chapter 33: “He’s a walking contradiction.” Maybe it’s true, and maybe we should pity Travis. The only way he can conceive of making the world a better place is through violence. Or maybe he’s just an asshole.

The Cannes win may have had a bit of a negative impact, however. Speaking to Peter Biskind for his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Scorsese said he would always “thank the French for giving me that grand prize … that allowed me to reveal to myself what a total failure I could be. It was a few weeks after … that I remember I started playing with drugs when I was doing New York, New York. For me, it was the beginning of going into an abyss for about two years and coming out of it just barely alive.”

Taxi Driver is not Martin Scorsese’s most entertaining film. That will forever be Goodfellas. It may not be his richest film – that’s probably Raging Bull or The Last Temptation of Christ. But Taxi Driver was the one that proved he could be edgy, push buttons, enthral teenagers and still be beautiful.