God's lonely man

Rating: 9/10 (26 September 2003)

*********SPOILERS******* Seeming out of nowhere a taxi rolls out of the night mist and as it turns sideways on the screen facing the theater audience the title of the movie appears in eerie neon, so starts Martin Scorese's "Taxi Driver".
Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro, keeps a diary at home where he records his thoughts as well as his daily experience on and off the streets of New York as he drives a cab to support himself. "I'm God's lonely man" Travis constantly writes in his diary. Trying to fit into a vast an impersonal city like New York is too much for Travis. He feels more at home by himself with his thoughts and fantasies then socializing with people.
In the movie Travis has two relationships. One with a woman the other with a girl, both end up disastrous. The first with Besty, Sybill Shepherd, a campaign worker for presidential candidate Charles Palintine, Lenoard Harris, and the second with Iris, Jody Foster, a 12 year old prostitute who turns tricks for and is looked after by her pimp Sport, Harvey Keitel.
Travis spots Besty at the Palintine campaign offices in midtown Manhattan while he's driving his cab and falls in love with her. Travis going so far as to volunteer to work for the Palintine campaign so he can be with her. After a while Travis gets friendly and close enough with Besty to take her out to the movies on a date with him. It turns out that Travis' limited knowledge of the entertainment world, the only movies that Travis watches and knows about are porno flicks, leaves him hurt and humiliated when Besty, shocked that Travis would take her to an X-rated theater, walks out on him.
Some time later Travis back on his job driving a cab one night in the East Village encounters Iris trying to run away from her pimp Sport when she jumps into his cab. Sport gets into the cab with Iris and after sweet talking Iris to come back with him gives Travis a twenty dollar bill for all the trouble that Iris caused and tells Travis to forget all about it. Travis soon becomes fixated with rescuing Iris from her life on the streets and from working for Sport for whom Travis begins to develop a very strong and violent dislike of.
As the movie slowly moves to it's bloody and explosive conclusion it's obvious that Travis has gone over the deep end. Arming himself to the teeth and getting himself into shape, both physically and mentally, for the battle against all those evil forces that are lurking around him that is sure to come. His frustration together with his ignorance and alienation of the real world has turned Travis, who was friendly and likable if just a bit odd at the beginning of the movie, into a Frankenstein monster.
The movie "Taxi Driver" is filled with academy award caliber acting imaginary and gritty big city photography and a multi-layer story that's easy to follow due to a very skillful job of directing. The movie also has one of the most haunting and memorable musical score that I've ever herd in any movie and it more then deserves all the accolades that it received over all these years.
The only bad thing that I can say about "Taxi driver" is that director Martin Scorsese made the movie too soon in his career. It's been 27 years since Scorsese made the movie "Taxi Driver" and since then, with all the films that he directed, he's never come close to making any movie as good as it and for all we know he never will. Like Orson Wells in 1941 when he made "Citizen Kane" that over forty years until his death in 1985 Wells could never do anything on film to top that movie and the only place that Wells could go after he made "Citizen Kane" was down.