70s Rewind: TAXI DRIVER Magnificent in 4K, Wrong Ratio and All
I attended the Saturday night screening at the AMC Northpark in Dallas, Texas, where we had to wait 20 minutes for it to start, the film was presented in the wrong aspect ratio (a problem experienced elsewhere as well; see link below), and a few audience members thought they were seeing a prequel to Meet the Fockers, laughing throughout.
Admittedly, I had further distractions.
For much of the first half of the movie, my untrained eyes were mesmerized by the beauty of the "print." The restoration looks wonderful, and whatever debate 4K may rightly inspire, it felt as though I was watching the movie on opening day in February 1976. I saw it in 35mm at a Los Angeles repertory theater somewhere between 1979 and 1981 (after I'd seen in it on broadcast television once or twice, drastically edited and interrupted by commercials). As I recall, it was a sparsely-attended showing and the print was not in pristine shape by any definition, but it was still a shattering experience.
I've lost track of how many times I've seen it since then, but it's firmly imprinted itself in my memory, to the point that watching it on Saturday night felt like repeating a conversation I've had in my head for years. It all felt so familiar that I was free to admire the eloquence of Martin Scorsese's direction, the meticulous, fluid editing (Marcia Lucas served as supervising film editor), and the versatility of Michael Chapman's photography, ranging from the famously dirty streets to the menacing nights to the daytime beauty of Cybill Shepherd and Jodie Foster.
Plus the overwrought magnificence of Bernard Hermann's score.
Yes, they were all so young then; only Harvey Keitel looks the same now because he was already old beyond his years. De Niro's face is so angular and hard-boned; has he ever looked the same since Raging Bull four years later?
Shepherd holds her own much better than I remembered in her meal scene with De Niro, studying him, deciding that he's the most interesting man she's ever met. Foster is an absolute marvel in her meal scene with De Niro, looking absolutely like a child, acting like a mature woman, barely suggesting the ache that she holds deep within her soul.
And no matter how many times you've seen the film, it's impossible not to be impressed, moved, deeply affected by De Niro as his open sore goes unnoticed and hardens into a cancerous tumor, eating away at him, leaving nothing but rage and the overpowering need to do something. And as justly celebrated as the improvised scenes are, mostly memorably the solo "talk to the mirror," they would be nothing without Paul Schrader's script, which provides the spine and the characters and all of the drama, wrenched up from his gut and the darkest recesses of his diseased mind.
Taxi Driver retains its deep, transfixing power. The climax still shook me, and the movie as a whole is haunting my dreams again. I'm not hailing a cab anytime soon.
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