"Morbid self-attention"

Rating: 8/10 (8 June 2007)

This picture has been recognised as Scorcese's first masterpiece. It's not his first really great film  that would be Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (which I actually prefer to Taxi Driver)  but it's his first work as a really mature director. He'd shown talent before this, but there's just so much detail and control on display here.
Taxi driver is a film about two worlds as seen by Travis  the low-down, dirty underworld and the clean, respectable, "normal" world. Travis desperately wants to be part of the normal world but isn't equipped to break out of the low world. Scorcese's camera roves around in prowling point-of-view shots, to show us Travis' wandering mind. He makes great use of colour to create the two different worlds  grimy greys and greens for the low world, clean whites and reds for the high world. There are plenty of little details that add extra layers  for example the two guys arguing in the background during the opening scene.
Scorcese is often thought of as a modern director, part of a new wave. But actually Scorcese and this new wave were extremely retrospective. In Taxi Driver you can see shades of Hitchcock in the way he puts the audience inside the character's state of mind. He is like Kurosawa in the way he tailors his shooting style for different moods  particularly that director's High and Low. The character of Travis and the seedy world he inhabits also occasionally reminds me of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom as well. In terms of style Taxi Driver could have been made by any of these, by this time, elderly directors. It's only really the frankness of the sex and violence that mark it as the work of a young director.
Travis is the first of Scorcese's loser heroes. Like Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, he does the "wrong" thing to achieve his aims, but ends up succeeding anyway. This is the most modern thing about Taxi Driver  it's the very opposite of Hollywood's old code of "no crime without punishment".
Like a lot of American cinema of this era, the Vietnam war casts its shadow over Taxi Driver. It's subtle  Travis is an ex-marine, and it's fairly clear his wartime experiences have contributed to his current state of mind. During the war there were plenty of heavy-handed allegorical films, and later there would be lots of heavy-handed films dealing with the war itself, but coming in between this is perhaps the harshest depiction of the Vietnam generation.
So yes, Taxi Driver is expertly constructed in terms of its direction. It's also brilliantly acted and scored (perhaps Bernard Hermann's best score). It's extremely bleak and difficult to watch though. While it's possible to sympathise with and understand Travis the picture lacks the humanity of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Raging Bull or King of Comedy, and it's never really spoken to me as deeply as any of those films.