Perfect, even for '70s standards

Rating: 10/10 (10 April 2013)

Although I've seen Taxi Driver many times, on TV and on DVD, today I had the rare opportunity of watching it on the big screen, seated in a dark theatre room, the way all movies should be seen. No matter how many times I watch the movie, and in whatever conditions, I never cease to be amazed at this movie, at its boldness, at the fact it exists at all. The '70s are my favourite era of film, both in American and around the world, and for me Taxi Driver is one of its most magnificent achievements, so many decades later still towering over many of that decade's masterpieces, so ahead of its time the tribulations of the protagonist still disturb modern viewers by how prescient and immediate they are.
Robert DeNiro plays Travis Bickle, a Vietnam veteran who can't sleep at nights and drives around, and so he may as well do that for money. Bickle is lonely, socially inept, almost always wears his army jacket, his name written on the back, a part of his identity he clings to tenaciously. Bickle is the proverbial nobody, but in his slowly-decaying mind he conjures thoughts of becoming a great man, of doing something important. His thoughts, though, are as blurry as his conversational skills and he's not sure what he wants to achieve, what ideas are those. Nevertheless constantly writes in his diary that he wants to clean up the city, which is an open sewer full of filth, and the movie slowly shows Bickle changing into a megalomaniac vigilante with delusions of grandeur. The movie, and Bickle, are preparing the viewer for a spectacular finale, and they don't disappoint.
Although the movie makes it clear Bickle is slightly unbalanced from the first moment we see him, applying to a job as a cabbie (in a short but memorable scene with Joe Spinell), it doesn't bother trying to give reasons, or any background on his past life. His hatred for lowlifes, pushers, prostitutes and pimps isn't a cause but just something his already deranged brain focuses to release his anger. When he tries to be an ordinary man, and find love and companionship, we see how out of his element he is. His conversations with other cabbies are always tense and awkward. And when he tries to date Betsy, a woman (Cybill Shepherd) involved in a campaign to get Senator Palantine elected as President, she breaks up with him when he casually takes her to a porn movie. When his experiments at normalcy fail, he concentrates his efforts and money to remake himself into a vigilante with a confused plan to murder Palantine on vague motives (Bickle's mind is hazy, the movie never is – it just puts the viewer right in his head, which probably makes not a lot of sense even to himself) before becoming obsessed with saving a teenage prostitute (Jodie Foster) from her smooth-talking pimp (Harvey Keitel).
Every scene and line in this movie is carefully thought to show Bickle's deranged state of mind and to carefully and thoroughly chronicle his descent into suicidal madness. Few movies are more perfect than Taxi Driver in bringing together all aspects of filmmaking into a perfect whole. Lawrence of Arabia, Chinatown and 2001: A Space Odyssey before, and a handful since. It's a marvel to see it unwind before your eyes: the dialogue, the performances of everyone, the shots of New York at night, Bernard Herrmann's half romantic half bleak score so often perfectly mirroring and enhancing Bickle's state of mind. Although DeNiro is to commend for this performance, undoubtedly the best of his career, all the other actors are equally excellent, from Shepherd to Foster, from Keitel to a young Albert Brooks in a short but wonderfully comical role. Martin Scorsese's direction was perhaps never this crisp and accurate again, and Paul Schrader never wrote such a remarkable screenplay again. It's clear on every scene that these men and women brought their best talent to the movie, and thanks to their hard work we've been graced with one of the best movies ever made.