“The idea had been growing in my brain for some time: TRUE force. All the king's men cannot put it back together again.”

    The 1970s were the dawn of a new age in filmmakers. Many directors who are now considered the greatest of all time, including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, made their greatest works during this decade. One of these filmmakers was Martin Scorsese. Scorsese had made three pervious films, including the gritty drama Mean Streets that had first brought a young Robert De Niro to mainstream audiences. But nothing could prepare audiences for his 1976 film, a meditation on loneliness in the cruel world of New York City that would show the power of Mr. Scorsese and Mr. De Niro (and screenwriter Paul Schrader) to the world. This film was entitled Taxi Driver.

De Niro stars in the film as Travis Bickle. An ex-marine returning from Vietnam, Travis takes a job as a nighttime taxi driver in order to cure his insomnia. Unable to connect to anyone in the world, possibly due to the events in the war, Travis begins to stalk and eventually asks out Betsy (Cybil Shepherd), a young woman working for a possible presidential candidate. But on his date, he takes her to a hard core pornographic theater. In a brilliant scene that follows, we see Travis call her, hoping to make amends. In this scene, Scorsese keeps Travis distant from us, to show how far he has become from the world.

The event becomes the first catalyst into Travis’s deep isolation. He describes New York City at night as home to the worst people in the world and hopes that “someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” As Travis does his night routes, cinematographer Michael Chapman makes Travis’s taxi as a safe haven, his protected shell that isolates him from the dangerous world. It’s a frightening world for Travis Bickle, a man who wants to be moral but can’t understand how. He is sometimes a walking irony. He goes to the porn theater but condemns public sex. Bickle is a good person at heart but doesn’t know how to be a role model. That’s where Schrader’s choice to make Bickle a taxi driver comes into play. Bickle is ultimately isolated because he is invisible to the rest of the world. Eventually, Bickle can’t separate his world from the dangers of society, exemplified by a small role in which Mr. Scorsese plays a passenger for Bickle and delivers a disturbing monologue (this transition is also implemented by the amazing contrasting score, done by Bernard Herman).

At the heart of Taxi Drver is De Niro’s performance. We slowly watch Bickle decimate into almost nothing. Along with his performance in Raging Bull, this represents De Niro at his best. He acts as a person who shows no emotion to the world but we can seem them crumbling right in front of us. He can be charming, frightening, funny, and ultimately, sympathetic to our audience, even though some of his actions we condemn. Even when it comes down to the final sequence, De Niro justifies Travis’s actions through his performance. Or take the famous “You talkin’ to me sequence,” which was improvised by De Niro. Roger Ebert points out that, “It is the last line, "Well, I'm the only one here," that never gets quoted. It is the truest line in the film.” It comes to the point where even violence could be the only thing that could connect Travis to the world he exists in.

The other amazing performance is that of Jodie Foster, who did this film at the young age of fourteen (he character is twelve). Iris, a young prostitute, represents to Travis a physical thing he can save. In a world where Travis believes he must do good but ultimately doesn’t know how, Iris becomes a living person who needs saving, instead of an abstract idea. But due to Foster’s amazing performance, we can see that Iris is too far into her demise as a person. In a scene where Travis originally pays Iris for sex but instead insists that she runs away, Iris seems confused as a twelve year old girl, not understanding why Travis wouldn’t want sex. It’s extremely ironic: Iris acts as a twelve year old girl but does adult things.

Largely debated is the finale of Taxi Driver. After hunting down Iris’s pimp and his bodyguards, killing them in a brutally graphic scene, we get a sequence that almost feels like a dream. Travis is rewarded by the media, thanked by Iris’s parents, and even complimented by Betsy. Is this a dream? Is it supposed by a condemnation of violence in our culture? Or simply put for irony?

Taxi Driver represents the young Scorsese at his best. Though Scorsese would later make films that are as good as this, no film would have the same emotional power. Taxi Driver is a slow descent into loneliness and madness. It’s brilliantly shot and takes it time justifying the world that has destroyed Travis Bickle. But it’s a reminder about the corruption of society today. Society still has dangerous consequences for some people, and sometimes it is our responsibility to save ourselves in order to save others. And thirty years after, Mr. Scorsese finally received the Oscar he deserved (for a good film no less but one not as amazing). Taxi Driver is a small, dark, and violent work of art worth viewing over and over; a technical, performance, and directing masterpiece.