Taxi Driver II.

January 21, 2005 -- ROBERT De Niro has confirmed he’s in talks with Martin Scorsese about a possible sequel to their classic Taxi Driver. The acting legend, who starred as crazed cabbie Travis Bickle in the gritty 1976 masterpiece, says he and Scorsese have been mulling over script ideas. De Niro, 61, recently told journalists: “I was talking with Martin Scorsese about doing what I guess you’d call a sequel to Taxi Driver, where he is older.” The reunion would come just in time for De Niro, whose reputation is eroding with critically panned films like Meet the Fockers.

— New York Post

Taxi Driver II

Act I

After the shooting spree, bloodbath and rescue of Iris Steensma, Travis Bickle is celebrated as a hero. Reaction is ambivalent, too — much as it was in the case of Bernhard Goetz a decade later: People shouldn’t take the law into their own hands. Law enforcement and government officials pay lip service to that notion. But people are grateful to Bickle as well, and most of them would like to do something similar, given the right circumstances and the opportunity.

Charles Palantine’s presidential campaign picks up on the mood, hiring Bickle as a combination limo driver/policy advisor and public-opinion gauge. He’s treated deferentially by the campaign. He’s still also a nut, and nobody wants to annoy him or have any of that fury turned on them. Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) continues to be fascinated by Bickle — even more so, now that his mix of charisma and psychosis seems to be drawing political interest. Travis still makes Albert Brooks’s Tom nervous.

That’s all revealed in the opening credits. We pick up the story in 2000. Travis Bickle’s combination of Vietnam experience and determination have made him an excellent political strategist and operative. He’s switched parties, splitting with Palantine — a Democrat — over law-and-order issues; Travis Bickle is a Republican. Peter Boyle reprises his strategist role from the 1972 picture The Candidate Robert Redford, melded together with the character “Wizard” from the original Taxi Driver, only in this instance, he’s Bickle’s strategist/fixer. Bickle has served a couple of terms as mayor of New York, cleaning up Times Square — because as a regular patron of the ’70s grind houses, who’d know better about what kind of filth and depravity it was a breeding-ground for? — and turning it into the family-friendly theme park it’s become.

Now, he’s preparing to seek the Republican presidential nomination, with the backing of such notables at Guardian Angels founder and talk radio host Curtis Sliwa. (In this version, the Angels are still self-appointed maintainers of public order and safety, only they’ve modeled themselves after Bickle; instead of the T-shirts and red berets, they all sport Mohawks.) Some potentially damaging information surfaces, un known provenance: allegations that there may have been more to Travis’s relationship with Iris than a noble desire to rescue a girl in trouble.

Travis Bickle thinks he knows where it’s coming from. Wizard begs him to leave this kind of thing — running down and stamping out smears or rumors — to the professionals. But this time, it’s personal. Travis is certain it’s Tom, stemming from his jealousy about Betsy and his feeling that Travis Bickle is truly dangerous and has to be stopped. It’s a conflict between strategy and information, on Tom’s side, and action as typified by Travis. Bickle is determined to confront Tom and make him retract the allegations he’s sure Tom’s responsible for. As his quest accelerates, so does the frequency of discomfiting questions about Iris from various reporters and associates. The one person who could instantly stop all this, of course, can’t be found. Iris has disappeared, changed her name and built a new life for herself. She’s determined to leave her sordid past of prostitution and drug addiction as far behind as possible.

The first act ends with Travis confronting Tom, and Tom definitively proving he doesn’t have anything to do with the allegations. That raises two big questions. If Tom’s not behind it, who is? And where is Iris Steensma?

Act II
We find out who is behind the allegations. Sport, the pimp played by Harvey Keitel, is, of course, shot and killed during Travis Bickle’s climactic shooting spree in Taxi Driver. Scorsese and Keitel worked together before, on the picture that was the feature film debut for both of them. Harvey Keitel played J.R., the conflicted Catholic protagonist in Who’s That Knocking At My Door? written and directed by Scorsese in 1967. Now, it turns out, he and Sport were twins. J.R. worked to reconcile his Madonna/whore complex by rehabilitating prostitutes and drug addicts. One of them was Iris “Easy” Steensma. At first, of course, he doesn’t realize there’s any connection. But in flashback, we see him getting to know Iris’s story, realizing the connection with his twin brother, Sport — something he keeps from Iris. She bonds with him, but his feelings about women of Iris’s ilk prevent him from acting on his affectionate feelings.

(The weak spot here, obviously, is Iris. Wouldn't she recognize Sport? You could make J.R. really clean-cut, which would help differentiate him from Sport. Iris might even say J.R. reminds her of someone, without having her realize who . . . or maybe she does, but thinks she's mistaken or confused.)

J.R.'s conflicted feelings fester, and he comes to hate both his dead twin brother and Travis Bickle for killing him. When Bickle’s candidacy gathers momentum, J.R. is moved to try derailing him by leaking the details about Iris, even though they’re not true. J.R. is keen to make her more of a victim, more powerless, and by characterizing Bickle as the last in a long line of tormentors and abusers, he can reduce his feelings of revulsion toward her. The way J.R. sees it, Travis Bickle’s shootout traumatized Iris worse than anything she’d endured before that moment, that she felt she was to blame for all the bloodshed, and even if her exploiters were evil, she feels she killed them instead of escaping from them.

J.R.’s desire to rescue her curdles, turning his conception of himself from a rescuer to an avenger. Simply imperiling Bickle’s candidacy isn’t enough. J.R. becomes determined to assassinate Bickle, and we move through the second act with a series of scenes of J.R.’s preparation to kill Bickle that parallel Bickle’s preparations to shoot Palantine in Taxi Driver. At one chilling moment, we see Harvey Keitel staring into a mirror menacingly, and repeating, “I’m talking to you.”

This is intercut with Travis Bickle’s search for Iris Steensma. Poring over old phone books, files and Internet resources, he eventually tracks her down. She’s living in Vermont under a completely different name, alone, and refuses to come back to the city or to help Travis out of his jam; it would be too difficult to admit to her past and return to what she’d thought she’d escaped. Travis argues that he saved her when she needed it, and now he needs her help. It seems hopeless, and Iris seems determined not to leave her refuge — the emotional cost would be too great. But she does give him J.R.’s name as a person who might be able to help him. Travis leaves determined to fix this, and that may mean dealing with J.R. himself. The potential for violence has been ratcheted tighter.

Act III
Travis returns to the city as J.R.’s fury grows colder, more lethal and more determined. Travis gets ready to confront J.R.; J.R. is preparing to assassinate Travis. J.R. appears at a campaign rally, staying just long enough to be seen by Travis as a means of demonstrating he can get to him when he wants to.

After the rally, Travis tracks J.R. down. We see him preparing for this confrontation. Because he knows J.R. is armed, Travis has a gun as well. He comes up on J.R. in a deserted street. He tells him it’s over. That he can’t achieve whatever he’s after. Nervous about what J.R. might do, Travis has a handgun. J.R., noting this, makes the point that Travis has not changed, that he’s still violent and crazy. This makes Travis angry. He raises the gun, yelling for J.R. to shut up, when there’s a shout. A woman’s voice. It’s Iris. J.R., furious at what he thinks is a betrayal, shoots, but only wounds her. Travis, having wanted to protect Iris and himself, shoots J.R.

In the denouement, Iris clears Travis, who is lauded as a hero. Again.