One Man's Terrifying Vengeance

Rating: 10/10 (28 August 2007)

A perfect film.
Martin Scorsese displays complete mastery over his medium in this deeply disturbing 1976 masterpiece, and to my mind hasn't yet made another movie as good as this one (no, not even "Raging Bull").
In "Taxi Driver," Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a Vietnam veteran who drives a cab for a living. Isolated and lonely, Travis prowls the hellish streets of New York's worst neighborhoods, willing to drive customers anywhere they want to go, quietly nurturing vague fantasies of vengeance on what he perceives to be a sick culture. The whole movie is a nightmarish fever dream. I've never seen anyone capture visually what on the page would be stream of consciousness narration as well as Scorsese does here. And De Niro gives the performance of his, or anybody else's, career. His Travis is a fascinating creation, and one of the most frightening screen characters in the history of cinema. No one could keep me up nights quite like the seemingly ordinary Joe who's ready to snap at any moment and feels that his grisly duty is handed down to him from on high.
Cybill Shepherd plays Travis's nominal love interest with just the right amount of vapidity, and Jodie Foster, in a small, sweet and wonderful performance, plays Iris, the thirteen-year-old prostitute who becomes the object Travis sets out to save from the rotten world that has turned him into what he is. And the late Peter Boyle has a couple of beautiful moments as Travis's fellow cab driver, who tries to give him some counsel but is so obviously out of his league.
Shortly after "Taxi Driver" hit screens, Vietnam turned into a subject that film makers felt comfortable addressing directly ("Coming Home," "Apocalypse Now," "The Deer Hunter"). But none of these, though so much more actually ABOUT Vietnam, addressed half as well as "Taxi Driver" the toll that that conflict took on the men it sent back home.
Grade: A+