Maybe it’s the metaphor. The transition, the feeling of getting caught in between two places while not really being in either one. Moving characters from Point A to Point B, internally and externally. There is room to grow in the back of a taxi.
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It’s difficult to convey an inner struggle on film when a character is alone. Dialogue leaves more room for exposition, and yet, if you’re in the back of a taxi by yourself, what are you going to do? Stare introspectively out the window while the rain hits the glass pat-pat-pat, tires squeal, maybe a jolt as the cab stops short, a reminder that the outside world keeps moving even when we do our best to withdraw? Maybe. Or, you could turn to the one person you know won’t judge you—and even if they do, you’ll never see them again: your humble taxi driver.
It’s strange that Daddio so profoundly misses the point of this dynamic, given that there are plenty of models for what a good taxi scene should be. Take, for example, another film focused solely on the dynamic between taxi driver and passenger: Jim Jarmusch’s Night On Earth. In five different cities, the taxi provides the lens through which we learn about the film’s characters and the spaces they inhabit. In the New York section, the city comes alive alongside YoYo (Giancarlo Esposito) and Helmut (Armin Mueller-Stahl). YoYo is a native New Yorker; Helmut is a recent German immigrant who can’t get the hang of driving a cab.
In roughly 25 minutes, we get an intimate glimpse into the lives of these two men, even though there is so much we don’t know about YoYo. What does he do for work? Why is he out so late in Manhattan, when he lives in Brooklyn and knows it’s difficult to get a cab back to the outer boroughs? Yet, we stknow what kind of person he is. A control freak, his sister-in-law Angela (Rosie Perez) calls him. Taking over the cab from Helmut when he realizes Helmut barely knows how to drive, dragging Angela kicking and screaming into the cab when he spots her on the street. To the audience, he comes across more as a begrudging helper, the kind of person who steps up when no one else is willing to do so.
The unique dynamic between taxi driver and passenger is maybe best encapsulated in the ’90s HBO hidden-camera show Taxicab Confessions. Sure, Richard Linklater might climb into the back of a taxi in Slacker and immediately start talking about dreams and alternate realities to his cab driver, (who says absolutely nothing in response), and Martin Scorsese might hop into Robert De Niro’s cab in Taxi Driver with, seemingly, the express purpose of making De Niro’s Travis Bickle bear witness to the pain he experiences due to his wife’s infidelity, but this is more than a cinematic trope. Taxicab Confessions showed us, in the unfiltered late-night taxi rides that were recorded without the passengers knowing they were on camera, that people really do spill their guts in the back of taxis.
In a seemingly outrageous example, Pulp Fiction’sMel magazine, Taxicab Confessions co-creator Joe Gantz recalled one of the most memorable rides on the show: “We picked up a no-nonsense New Yorker from the NYPD Rescue Squad who was talking about how tough his job was. Then we started asking about some of the things he’d experienced. He leaned forward and explained to the driver all the ways he’d seen someone die. It was so haunting and sad. He told it both with emotion and with distance because he sees this stuff all the time.”
There’s something vulnerable in the act of calling a cab. Admitting that you need help, that you can’t get to where you need to be on your own. It’s not unlike walking into a therapist’s office for the first time. Maybe that’s why the film trope has persisted all the way up to Daddio, and why it plays out in real life, too. Sometimes, you just need to get something off your chest to someone unfamiliar yet close.
“You are the first person I’ve ever met who has killed somebody,” Esmarelda tells Butch. That might be true. Maybe it’s not. People don’t usually open up about their deepest secrets to total strangers. Unless, of course, they’re in the back of a taxi.