On every street in every city, there's a nobody who dreams of being a somebody...

Rating: Null/10 (4 September 2005)

Taxi Driver is one of the first earnest studies of urban alienation that, in a very real sense, predicted many of the inevitable consequences such a condition spawns, and from which America (and Britain) has suffered over the past two decades. It proved to be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy when, less than five years after it was filmed, a loner shot the US president to impress an actress who had appeared in this film. The implications of this are a little frightening when you think about it
Robert De Niro is scarily convincing as Travis Bickle, a nondescript Vietnam vet who observes the dissolution on the streets of New York from the isolation of his cab. Each night he drives the streets, witnessing a tide of depravity that spills into the back of his cab, and each morning, after his shift, he has to wipe from the back seat the results of those intrusions. That's a bad enough experience for any man, but Travis is a loner who longs for a normal life and relationships but is too inarticulate and confused to be able to obtain them. He ruins his chance with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), campaign worker for a senator seeking election, by taking her to a porn film on their first date, and is genuinely confused when she takes exception to such behaviour. As Bickle tries to win her back on a public phone, his face hidden from the viewer, the camera pans away from him to focus on a corridor leading to the street as if embarrassed for him, and from then on, as his descent into madness gathers pace, Travis seems to edge further toward the edge of the screen in almost every shot.
Bernard Herrmann's score superbly captures both the sleazy side of the New York streets and the sense of foreboding that permeates the entire film. Scorsese guides us through Bickle's increasingly disturbed state of mind without resorting to sensationalism or cheap manipulation of the audience, and Paul Schrader's intelligent script creates a completely believable character in Bickle as an unremarkable everyman who shares our standards of what's right and wrong but with a skewed perspective that has turned him into a ticking time-bomb. Only the speed with which Bickle and Iris develop a relationship and the contentious ending, for which too many people try to find a hidden meaning, weakens the film overall. That ending just doesn't sit right with the rest of the film  and Scorsese himself has discounted theories that it may be a dream sequence  but that shouldn't dissuade anyone with an interest in intelligent, thought-provoking films to catch this one at least once.