Classic for a Reason

Rating: 8/10 (27 June 2019)

"Taxi Driver" is an American classic. Very early in any cinephile's journey it will come up as a must watch film. This carries with it a danger, though. For some, like myself, they end up seeing Taxi Driver when they aren't really mature enough as a film watcher do appreciate it.
After seeing Paul Schrader's "First Reformed," I wanted to dig into more of his films and while he didn't direct "Taxi Driver," he did write it. I'm also not a big Scorsese fan but really it's more that I'm not a fan of gangster films and he makes a lot of them. I love Scorsese when he isn't doing the mob, so I wanted to revisit "Taxi Driver," for that reason as well.
A Scorsese film I have a shot at liking? I couldn't let myself go on, disliking Taxi Driver just because I was too young when I saw it the first time.
So there was definitely a lot about this film that I didn't understand or catch the first time I saw it. Having been raised pretty conservatively I was not aware of many of the issues Bickle was dealing with throughout the film.
Perhaps more than anything else though, the thing that I most didn't get when I was younger was that it is a character study.
I remember feeling that nothing was happening in the film when I watched it the first time. For someone whose main movie experience is with typical Hollywood fare, a film which simply follows a person around and the main plot is happening within the inner workings of their brain, is a bit alien feeling.
As an more experienced cinephile, I now appreciate and can see what the film is doing, even in the moments which I do not relate to as well.