One of the Greatest Film of All Time

Rating: 10/10 (16 January 2011)

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is an overwhelming reality of violence, and remained as one of the darkest picture about the transformation of an innocent being due to the environment that he's in. Opening with a lot of smoke, the taxi looked like it was emerged from hell. Travis Bickle is the one that's driving that taxi, he lives alone in his messy apartment, he's an insomniac, he eats a lot of junk foods and sugar, and the only show he knows to watch is pornography. At nights, during Travis' working hours, we take a look at the saturated color of New York, the dirty streets filled with all kinds of scum in Travis Bickle's deep paranoid eyes. During the day, we see the hope in living at a place like this, until Travis was rejected again by the society that he declares like a union, cold and distant. Travis' downward spiral cannot be stop, each time he is going deeper into violence. Travis' confrontation with violence is beginning to be excessive, hearing the words at the backseat by some mad husband planning to kill his wife with a .44 magnum, and in the streets some mad man shouting "I'll kill her, I'll kill her" only deepens Travis' idea of the bloodbath in the brothel later. He asks some advice from a fellow cab driver, Wizard. But they ended up not understanding each other's point, this is a critical moment for Travis, he seeks for clarity but did not get it, he was saying "I've got some real bad ideas in my head." And that idea will come to life, as he buys his own .44 magnum and different kinds of pistols, he gets his first kill on a small store trying to save it from a robber. Scorsese effectively isolated Travis from the society in each distant shot. Not only that Travis Bickle was influenced by Norman Bates, in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, but almost the whole film is Hitchcockian, from Scorsese's cameo, the homage on Rear Window in one scene and the frequent over the head shots. But at some point, Scorsese rises up from his master. In the second part of the film, Travis Bickle became John Wayne, trying to save a young prostitute from her pimp, a mirror plot from The Searchers. He acts again like a sane man, but he is slowly being dragged away from the reality. In the bloodbath, violence exploded, released from his captivity, he doesn't know what he is doing, but planned this thing obsessively and now that it happened, it is ironic that he was praised as a hero who rescues a young prostitute. The final scene as he drove Betsy into Manhattan, he seems like that he is back into sanity, but again he gave us a paranoid threatening look at the rear-view mirror, like the one he's been giving through the whole course of the film, and you know it might not be a happy ending after all. Bernard Herrmann's last score was truly a magnificent piece, it colored and shaped the image of Taxi Driver, haunting and unforgettable jazzy score. Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Robert De Niro all in premium shape and at their best in this agonizing dark masterpiece. Taxi Driver is so affecting because this story is all too real, Travis Bickle is not just a character in a movie, he is the character of the society, he is the voice-over of the isolated humanity, victimized by the system of the world.