The Cinema of Alienation

Rating: 9/10 (2 January 2007)

Working for the first time with misanthropic screenwriter Paul Schrader, and using Alfred Hitchcock's music score maker extraordinaire Bernard Hermann, Martin Scorsese crafted one of the bleakest and most memorable films about alienation with 1976's "Taxi Driver". Here we have the lonely cab driver Travis Bickle cruising the sleaziest streets in New York City, looking for love in all the wrong places, plotting his way to leave his mark with violence, and looking for redemption in the rescue of a child prostitute named Iris (a very young Jodie Foster).
Like the finest films from its decade, "Taxi Driver" is a intimate character-driven film haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam and Nixon-era politics that stained the psyche of the American people, especially those disenfranchised in the urban sectors. It's also a classic Scorsese story, nihilistic to the extreme, and containing what is still one of the most graphic and shocking bloodbaths when Travis Bickle finally goes on his rampage. The end result is quite ironic, and leaves a bitter halo imprinted on the viewer's mind.
By all accounts, this is a landmark film: one that heralded the first masterpiece from a director who would go on to a long and fruitful career, presented Robert DeNiro as a formidable headliner, and proclaimed Jodie Foster a serious actress. It's also one of the most controversial movies ever made, as it is the only film that can claim to have inspired an attempted presidential assassination when John Hinkle tried to shoot Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster whom he became obsessed with after seeing this film, which is not too far removed from Travis Bickle's aborted attempt to kill a Senator to impress Cybil Shepherd's character. All of this makes "Taxi Driver" a film classic, albeit a very dark one that will always have many people crying foul.