Pleasant Ranch

Martin Scorsese may well be the greatest living filmmaker. If not, he at least ranks in the top tier of greatest directors of all time. Even when working with the fairly standard biopic genre material of The Aviator, or doing remakes like Cape Fear, he always creates a film that is simply fascinating to behold. When it comes to Taxi Driver, you could watch it on mute and still be intrigued, or with the sound up and your eyes closed, and the movie would remain enchanting.

There aren’t many directors so capable at effortlessly building a world around you. You’ll feel as if you’re really sitting in that grimy taxi cab, right next to Travis Bickle. It almost has a documentary like feel with the gritty look of the film and the spontaneous nature of the script. It is as close as you can get to the “found footage” feel without gimmicks like hand held cameras.

The film stands as the second entry in something of a trilogy of films alongside The Searchers and Paris, Texas. All three films use essentially the same outline for their stories, and both Scorsese’s film and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas are considered loose remakes of The Searchers. The trilogy stands as a testament to how many different ways there are to tell a story, proving that old axiom that a movie isn’t about what it’s about, it’s about how it’s about it.

Where The Searchers is primarily an adventure film revolving around themes of prejudice and loneliness, where Wim Wenders chose to make a real, but sweet-hearted film about the reuniting of a family, Scorsese opts to highlight the darker aspects of the story, the sheer lonesomeness of the hero, the outsider. In all three stories, the lead takes it upon himself to do something he sees as heroic. In all three, the real morality of what he does is questionable, and in all three, the hero retreats from those he’s saved at the end, always trying to find validation in heroics, but never able to join in.

Each film is a statement on loneliness, and this is why these characters are so easy to sympathize with. All three characters commit, or have committed, deeds that normal human beings would not take pride in, but you find yourself wanting them all to come out okay, even Travis Bickle, who is half hero and half sociopath, because we all know what it feels like to be so alone.

Everyone has been at a point in their lives where they feel trapped in their own little bubble. Loneliness doesn’t just mean being alone, being single or living out in the middle of nowhere. Loneliness can happen even when you’re surrounded by people all day. We know where Travis has been.

Few people are willing to talk about the darkest aspect of the film, because it involves looking at your own darker instincts: We root for Travis Bickle in the end. We shouldn’t, but we do, because we wish he could be the hero, we wish the film was a western so that his simplistic moral compass would be correct. The tragedy is that it’s not a western.

While the film serves as part of a trilogy to The Searchers and Paris, Texas, it’s also something of a companion piece to First Blood, another film about a lonely Vietnam veteran who uses violence as a means of personal validation.

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