Review: Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

The beginning of the 1970s saw the rise of New Hollywood, an American film-making movement that changed movie-making forever with its searing honesty and hard-hitting realism. Classics like Chinatown, Network and The Godfather toppled cinematic taboos by presenting the movie-going public with radically gritty and audacious stories of the darker side of society and human nature. In my opinion the most powerful and effective film to come from this influential movement is 1976's Taxi Driver, a timeless masterwork from the great Martin Scorsese, who takes no prisoners in telling the story of a disenfranchised soul on the tattered fringe of society, and he drags you shocked but mesmerized to the very end.
Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro in perhaps his most famous role) is a lonely and mentally disturbed Vietnam veteran who doesn't feel welcome anywhere in his community, New York City. Suffering from insomnia (probably due to his experiences in Vietnam) he spends most nights taking drugs and hiding out in porno theatres waiting for the day to come when someone will give him the time of day. After awhile he decides to take a job as a taxi driver around NYC, and through this line of work he witnesses the full extent of urban malaise in New York. Sickened by this, Travis decides to set out to try and clean up the city for good using no-holds-barred violence. In the meantime, he tries to forge a relationship with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a stunning campaign aid for presidential candidate Charles Pallantine, but he fails miserably and naturally this increases his frustration and anger. He makes an assassination attempt on Pallantine's life, but fails in this act also. Finally he redeems himself when he saves the life of an underage prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster, turning in one of the most professional child performances in cinematic history) from her abusive pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel).
Robert De Niro is nothing short of a force of nature in the lead role. After having famously worked as a cab driver for months to prepare for the part, he effortlessly creates a scarred man beyond help who sees no harm in trying to clean up the streets through acts of violence. This is an unmistakably scary performance; there are no traces of Robert De Niro here. Jodie Foster, who has become one of the very few famous child actors to become a highly respected adult performer, gives a turn far beyond her years at the time, flawlessly downplaying Iris' outward self-confidence and inward vulnerability (which is exactly how many 14-year-old girls AND boys are even now), Cybill Shepherd brings sophistication and grace to the career-driven blonde bombshell Betsy, and Peter Boyle is perfectly cast as Wizard, the streetwise guy who Travis turns to for advice. For better or worse these are all types you could find in just about any street, and De Niro, Foster, Shepherd and Boyle breathe life into them with absolute accuracy.
Working from Paul Schrader's uncompromising screenplay (Schrader used Arthur Bremer as the inspiration for Travis), Martin Scorsese achieves his most accomplished directorial achievement after Raging Bull. He was perhaps the ideal director to tell this story, having been raised on crime films whilst grown up in New York's Little Italy, and he pulls no punches (keep an eye out for him in a cameo appearance as a guy in Travis' cab going home to kill his unfaithful wife). Scorsese summons all the tools and elements of film-making to bring to the table a ferocious portrait of America reduced nearly to the status of a cruel and dark wasteland that sucks people in and crushes all their hopes and dreams: most notably, the editing is fluid, the cinematography is grainy as it should be and never too intrusive, and Bernard Herrmann's jazzy and evocative score is instantly recognizable.
With this landmark film that changed the cinematic landscape forever, Scorsese, Schrader and De Niro all worked to make a social statement that is still so true and shocking, but one you simply can't look away from no matter how harder it may be to stomach. As (possibly, depending on whether you view Travis as a villain or as just as a really deranged antihero) troubling as it may be there have always been many Travis Bickles all over the world, and that's where Taxi Driver's timeless and universal truth lies.