Good? Of course. Great? Erm...

Rating: 5/10 (20 December 2002)

The comments I sent in recently were removed almost immediately after being accepted - for no explicable reason, unless the problem was that they were too long-winded, in which case the IMDb did have a point. I'll try to be concise this time.
No doubt the talent that went into this film, and ended up on screen, is enormous. Well written, well designed, well directed, well edited, well scored, well acted; dialogue crisp, rhythms strong, illusion complete. What could possibly be missing?
A lot, as it turns out. Imagine a series of diary entries written by the best prose stylist in the world, and imagine that this master stylist really believes in the thoughts he or she is expressing ... but that these thoughts are monotonous, trivial and of no concievable interest to anyone else. The world of Travis Bickle is well realised and we are completely drawn into it, but it's a world consisting of next to nothing. Travis is a narcissist. Nothing is real to him but himself and his own subjective impressions. That's all he sees and that's all we see. We get no sense of the world - the external world, that is - that this person inhabits (is New York really the jungle he sees it as being? who knows?); nor do we even get much sense of his psychology, his inner world. Just a series of subjective impressions. (The fact that the last ones are so ugly and violent, and unredeemed by any REASON for their being so ugly and violent, also detracts from the film.) It's done well, but one doesn't much care whether it's done at all.
I'm not saying anything positive against "Taxi Driver", you understand. A superbly crafted film is still a superbly crafted film. But those who say that it's one of the greatest film of all time (or some such rash claim) simply don't understand what greatness consists of.