Excellent film by Martin Scorsese that foreshadows the great Bringing Out The Dead, which he directed on almost the same subject over two decades later.

Rating: 10/10 (2 April 2001)

Taxi Driver deals with the perils of big city life, and the film works so well because it adds a touch of mental instability to this otherwise tired theme. It focuses on the life of a lower middle class man who lives in a city that he finds filthy and that is full of people who disgust him. Everyone has impulses to do things that they know they would never actually do, and the vast majority of people generally listen to the voice of reason. Taxi Driver deals with what happens when a man acts on those impulses, driven away from reason by the multitude of atrocities that surround him.

Travis Bickle seemed to be a person who had a very lonely life. The film begins with him applying for a job as a taxi driver because he can't sleep at night, and this may be a symptom of his loneliness. He likes to spend his free time at the adult movie theater, and he even took a date there, which tends to give the impression that he is not very experienced with women. Like most introverted people, he kind of kept to himself a lot of the time, and almost always seemed to be fairly deep in thought about something. As he took in everything around him, he constantly saw terrible things (bums, drug dealers, twelve-year-old prostitutes, etc) that drove him closer and closer to the proverbial edge.' His inability to establish healthy relationships is more than likely a result of bad experiences during childhood, which also gave him this mistrustful and overall negative perception of the world. His rescue attempt, although seemingly insignificant in such a huge city full of crime and corruption, was his personal endeavor to try to make a difference, to do something important and good which would give a specific purpose to his otherwise meaningless life.
Travis Bickle seemed to gradually begin to realize his own dire intentions and at one point even seeks advice from one of his fellow cab drivers. He goes to an experienced cab driver known as the `Wizard,' and basically asks him for direction in life, but walks away without having received any comprehensive advice. It seems that he felt that there was something positive in the world that he was missing and that was why he had such negative feelings about it. When he found that the Wizard' evidently either had no idea what he was talking about or had a very hard time explaining himself, he seemed to be discouraged. The fact that he was not reassured at all by this guidance troubled him, and it seemed to narrow his options. It made him feel that the world really did exist exactly as he saw it, and he began to feel even more strongly that something had to be done about it.

Taxi Driver is a very dark film. There is a lot of narrative by Bickle, a lot of it as he writes letters, which he may or may not even have anyone to send to. Even more important that that is when he would be driving in his taxi and his thoughts would be narrated out loud for the audience. Often during these narrations the viewer would see the streets as Bickle saw them, very dark, cold, dirty, and filled with questionable and suspicious looking people. Coupled with his unhappy words, this darkness gave the city an entirely dismal look.
One of the things that this film is most famous for is Bickle's mohawk. It is such a drastic change that it calls attention to his psychotic condition. The first time his mohawk is shown is while he is at one of senator Palantine's rallies. Bickle is smiling radiantly and capping enthusiastically, but he also has this crude and extreme haircut, and he is wearing an army-green trench coat through which the viewer can clearly see the bulges of the guns that he recently purchased. You know he's not there to cheer on his favorite candidate. This plan to assassinate Palantine, like his conversation with the Wizard, and his relationship with Betsy, was another failure, and this was part of the reason that he put so much more effort into being successful in helping Iris.
The countless point of view shots from the taxi window looking at prostitutes, pushers, pimps, thieves, and all sorts of other sleazy people that allowed the viewer to relate to Bickle's view of the world. Robert DeNiro provided a spectacular performance as the mentally disturbed Travis Bickle, and the brilliant direction by Martin Scorsese also served to mold Taxi Driver into the timeless classic that it has become. It's not a pretty film in any way, but the skill and the style are unmistakable.