a poetic, alienated film, which refuses easy conclusions.

Rating: Null/10 (3 June 2002)

This contains some spoilers.
The haunting jazz sax that sounds behind much of Taxi Driver seems to be sounding an elegy for its numberless wandering people, seen through the eyes of Robert DeNiro's own disturbed character. The film is violent and shocking in places, but it resonates with a deep sadness for the ceaseless motion of the city. It threatens numerous false endings, which give its eventual conclusion an uncomfortable lack of finality. As we hear a letter from Jodie Foster's parents being read across images of DeNiro convalescing, we sense that no grand justice has been achieved, that she has returned to a crushing family she originally fled, who will ominously make sure such an escape "cannot happen again". Neither love nor salvation wait: driving away in silence at the end, DeNiro has found some peace in a world that remains restless and brutal, but this remains a city whose desires are vague, nocturnal, and ceaseless. Scorsese refuses to close his film with the the cathartic simplicity of shining-gun violence, and the American love-affair with firearms takes its place as another urban fantasy, another symptom of deeper sickness which can end life but which has no power to resolve its complex pain.