The long, lonely, seemingly never-ending road.

Rating: Null/10 (29 December 2010)

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver emerges out of the mist and confusion of American movies during the past half century as a film not just about a lonesome soul searching for redemption, but also a deep and penetrating look at humanity as a whole, pondering our attempts to connect and establish relationships. It is at once both depressing and engrossing. Like its main character, Travis Bickle, it is a walking contradiction.
Travis is one of the great characters of modern American cinema. He is a Vietnam vet, war-torn and psychologically strained, unable to sleep and obsessed with finding the right direction for his life as well as making a difference in the seedy streets of the town he calls home: New York City. Robert De Niro, one of the great modern American actors, gives a quiet, gentle, yet emotionally disturbed performance as he completely embodies every element of Travis. The various voice-overs provide more detail and information into his psychological profile, deepening our understanding and sympathy with him.
Surrounding De Niro are other solid actors such as Harvey Keitel as the conniving pimp Sport, Albert Brooks as a nerdy campaign manager, Cybil Shepherd as the object of Travis' pure affections, and Jodie Foster as a 12 year-old prostitute who becomes the object of Travis' desire to take charge and initiate change. The whole cast is so good, it becomes ridiculous and redundant to praise or discuss them; they are these characters and must be accepted as such.
The real collaboration for this film is that between director Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader, working here for the first but not last time. Schrader's screenplay is partially autobiographical, but also takes many plot points from John Ford's The Searchers, Dostoevsky and many other sources. What Scorsese is able to do in terms of realizing and visualizing these scenes is nothing short of mind-blowing. The opening shot is that of a yellow taxi, emerging like a great beast amidst the steam and fog that clouds the streets of New York like a mysterious forest. Scorsese then emphasizes the film's point of view by giving us extreme closeups of Bickles' eyes. All along, we see all that he does and eventually come to terms with how he sees the world. We sympathize because he's right and because we want him to come to grips with reality.
Almost 35 years later, Taxi Driver remains a purely great American movie experience. The sets are impeccable, the camera-work perfect in how Scorsese allows it to glide across the streets, picking up every sordid detail Travis filters. Finally, the score must be given its due weight, which is nothing short of vital. The great Bernard Herrmann of Hitchcock fame ended his career with this minimalistic score compose entirely of brass with a saxophone solo so bittersweet and direct that it completely encompasses all the feelings of Travis and the atmosphere of the city. It is a great score, perfectly adept to what Herrmann attempted to do. This is always on great films lists, as well as included at the top of Scorsese and De Niro's best work. There's a reason for that: because it is.