Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybil Shepard, Albert Brooks
Have I Seen It Before?: Never. They’re coming to take my official film snob membership card as I type this.
Did I like it?: It’s an experience, but I’d have to be a certain kind of person (read: Hinckley) to say I really enjoyed it.
The movie is such an insistent attempt to make a film that eschews the usual trappings of Hollywood entertainment, but Bernard Hermann’s score (his last, he passed away before the wide release of the film) bubbles through the movie. If you were only listening to the proceedings instead of watching, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a romantic comedy in the early goings. Between that and the whole cowboy motif and homages to The Searchers (1956) it’s hard not to see this movie as the story of a man—and perhaps a culture at large—warped by exposure to cowboy stories that never fully came to grips with the violence that surrounds them.
And then there’s that ending.
I’m so constantly annoyed by the rash of youtube videos “explaining” the ending of like, every film released. They’re boring bordering on odious. I don’t need an explanation of Joker (2019). It’s pretty straight ahead, if wobbly. For that matter, why would anyone need the ending of a movie like Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) explained. Most—if not all—current movies are as straight ahead in their proceedings as your basic fairy tale.
But I digress. I’ll be damned if at the end of this movie I didn’t want to rush to the internet and have the true nature of our final moments with Bickle spoon-fed to me. Thankfully—blissfully, even—there is no concrete answer. Both Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader acknowledge the interpretation that after Bickle guns down the gangsters, synapses fire in his mind for the last time and he imagines a world where he ended up a hero, but maintain that their intension was to display the irony of a monster like their main character slipping into a hero’s role purely by luck, with the knowledge that he will be nowhere near that lucky the next time. I like that version of the ending better; it inflames the imagination.