A Critic's Film

Rating: 5/10 (6 March 2002)

I just went back to this film for the first time in several years, and I'm afraid a dispassionate look at (and perhaps a re-examination of) Taxi Driver is in order. I was stunned by how substandard I found it, and made me realize that as many people as I've heard talk about how great a film it is, hardly anyone at all actually says they ENJOYED watching it. Just because something's bleak doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable; I'm sure you can all think of many films that fit both criteria (if you can't, go rent Saturday Night and Sunday Morning). Not that there isn't a lot that's great about the movie, mostly down to Scorsese and De Niro, who both turn in extraordinary efforts. But--and the DVD version of the film helps point this out--the script is third rate (and could only have been written by a film critic), the story never really develops (the episodic format of the screenplay is an easy way out to avoid watching Travis Bickle's descent into anomie, instead we get to measure the regress by watching his hair grow shorter), and the other characters are little more than caricatures, as we never learn more about them (other than De Niro's and Jodie Foster's) after the first minute they are onscreen.
Rent or buy the DVD, read the script, and see how much better this film was made by Scorsese's ability to interpolate the ad libbing on the part of De Niro (and Harvey Keitel), and his amazing ability to capture NYC at its absolute nadir, when Bickle's description of the city to Senator Palantine is not overstatement. As for other performances, Jodie Foster is extremely good in a role that doesn't have her on the screen that long, Cybill Shepherd acts like a very attractive block of wood (her forte), and Albert Brooks plays yet another annoying guy. Keitel is superb as the pimp, but his chemistry with De Niro is the only such instance in the whole film.

It's ultimately a beautifully filmed weak story, and even the line that everyone quotes ad nauseam (and no, I'm NOT talking to you) was ad libbed by De Niro. Wish he'd written the whole thing. I think the film critics' union banded together here to support one of their own. Watch it, but keep your eyes open.