"The days go on and on, they don't end".

Rating: 9/10 (1 September 2001)

SPOILER WARNING
So are the words of misfit taxi driver Travis Bickle (De Niro), a man who "would not take it anymore". De Niro presence carries this film, from the shots of him driving his cab around hellish 70's New York, right through until the end (ironically, still driving his cab around the hellish 70's New York). Taxi Driver works on a loop, as we follow Bickle deeper into his plan to "wipe the scum of the streets".
The film does however; contain some serious flaws, which in an odd way only help to highlight the power of the film. Firstly, too much is left up to audience work out, and for a character like Travis, we need to know the full story if we are to ultimately root for him, how are we to feel sympathy for his anguish when we don't know the cause of it, most viewers speculate it comes from his days in the army, his tour in Vietnam, other like to think that the disease of the city has finally consumed him. I would like to pose another character variation; to me Travis is nothing more than hateful man. He's a man who isn't consumed by the city but reflects it, he takes in the paranoia, the selfishness, the impotence, he talks himself into thinking that what he is doing is right, that because Betsy (Cybil Sheapard) refuses his advances it's justification for him to assassinate Palentine.
The morality of the character is a screwed up as the hookers he watches as he passes by in the solitary of his cab, moving through the streets `like a ghost'. There is also a strong racist feeling to the film, from the way Travis looks at the pimps who are hanging out the coffee shop, to his complete lack of hesitation when he blows away the corner store bandit. It's only towards the end of the film that any of this starts to work, we get what Schrader and Scorsese were trying to say with this film, from the moment Travis steps out of his cab and approaches Sport (Harvey Kietel) for the second time, we realise what we are witnessing. Scorsese, Schrader and De Niro have lured us into a massacre, a blood bath... Bringing into play our own sense of morality, hopefully making us feel changed, this is why Taxi Driver is a classic.
The film say's so much about man, the masochistic rage that Travis displays whilst confronted by the wimpy Tom (Albert Brooks), but at the same time he's sickened by the enthusiastic babble of his "creepy fair" (Scorsese, "You ever seen what a 44 can do to a woman's P***y?"). Travis' own messes up morality makes him a hero; his own selfish acts have proven to appear selfless, stripping away the façade of the film hero. Of course Taxi Driver was criminally robed of Oscars by the flag waving patriotism of Rocky, just going to show how close to the bone Taxi Drivers portrait of America was.

9/10