Word: taxi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ambition was to be a lawyer and, perhaps, President of the U.S. Now a self-assured 13, Jodie Foster wants instead to be "a very good actress," a goal for which she is almost frighteningly well endowed. What hooked her on acting as a career was the movie Taxi Driver (TIME, Feb. 16), a florid melodrama of Manhattan's streets that is mostly memorable for Jodie's portrayal, as to the bordello born, of the trick-wise twelve-year-old whore...
...hoping, however, that Taxi Driver will bring her more adult parts. Says she: "The only place I draw the line is nudity." Then, forgetting what the role of Iris was all about, she adds: "Anyway, no one would want to see a 13-year-old take off her clothes." Some day, she says, she intends to play Othello, no less. Coming from Jodie Foster, that is no teeny-bopper fantasy...
Familiar Breed. Travis, the taxi driver, is such a creature, and Robert deNiro has him down pat in a stunning, veracious performance. Director Scorsese has his environment down pat too. The garage that Travis works out of, the cafeteria where he takes his breaks, the porno theaters he haunts, the menacing avenues he cruises are rendered with thoroughly depressing realism...
Fatness is the beginning, though not the end, of Taxi Driver's problems. For one thing, Travis is more a case study than a character. The backgrounds against which he moves never transcend the documentary category, never fuse into an artful vision of urban hellishness. Scorsese's work may be best-of-breed, but it is a familiar breed. The movie has an air of recent discovery, of shocked innocence about the tawdry quality of city life that is gratingly naive...
...somehow it is all too heavy with easy sociologizing to be truly moving. The taxi driver's shift from lonely neurotic to killer is yawningly predictable-no more informative than a Sunday supplement piece on the mind of the assassin. (Travis keeps a diary, just as Arthur Bremer did before he shot George Wallace.) What Scorsese is good at is moments-chance encounters between unlikely characters, awkward conversations between ignorant people, men and women trying, often with comic poignancy, to understand a world in which the old verities offer neither guidance nor insight. He can be an effective film...