Scorsese's powerful and disturbing masterpiece of social alienation.

Rating: 10/10 (14 February 2006)

Taxi Driver (1976)
Number 1 - 1976
Top 10 - 1970s
Top 50 - All Time
On every street in every city, there's a nobody who dreams of being a somebody...
A mentally unstable Vietnam war veteran, returns back to New York to find out that it is filthy. He discovers that the streets are overflowing with prostitutes, pimps, druglords and scum. It is soon after he takes a job as a Taxi Driver, where his insides boil, and he takes the law into his own hands.
Robert De Niro gives a shockingly brilliant performance as Travis Bickle in what is perhaps Martin Scorsese's finest work.
Scorsese's film (quite possibly his best) is a gritty, disturbing story of a lonely man and his anger at the social degeneration around him. The New York we see in Taxi Driver, is a city ravaged by crime, unemployment and filth. The now, colourful, buzzing Times Square was no such thing then; it was a strange place at light, not as bright and definitely not as inviting.
Taxi Driver must be praised for its constant and thoughtful inside into the character of Travis Bickle. The character study is harrowing. We are shown the problems in the American society, loneliness, corruption, isolation through the eyes of one man who crumbles under the urban jungle of 1970s New York. Taxi Driver may also be a slap on the face regarding the Vietnam War. Soldiers, like Bickle in the film, travel 11,000 miles to fight Communism in the jungles of the Vietcong, only to return dehumanised into a constant war on the streets, because many soldiers didn't return to no fancy fireworks and a home by the lake - maybe I'm just going too far.
In 1976, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences opted for Rocky, the boxing fairytale, an injustice towards Taxi Driver, which was clearly the most superior motion picture of the year. While Rocky, maybe, inspiring and crowd pleasing, Taxi Driver, is a rivetingly deep and psychological film, far more important.
A pivotal masterpiece
10/10