Critics reviews

By transferring the harsh, obsessive psychology of Ford’s classic to an urban context, [Paul Schrader] and director Martin Scorsese simultaneously honored film history while rewriting it with their own signature. At this point, I don’t need to go through what’s classic and enduring about Taxi Driver . . . , but I’ve always found it fascinating how Schrader reversed the terms of Ford’s ending.

Travis' diatribes against the decadence of New York – scripted, with perfect economy, by Paul Schrader – have become justly famous, but then the alternative on offer is just as bleak: as Wizard (Peter Boyle), the nearest thing he has to a confidant, tells him, "I envy you your youth. Go on, get laid, get drunk. Do anything. You got no choice, anyway. I mean, we're all fucked.

In Taxi Driver (1976), playful gestures and off-the-cuff humour are frequently transmuted into violence, as if elements of the world through which Travis moves get grimly distorted simply by proximity to his seething fury and psychological unravelling, and manifested again as acts of terrible cruelty.

This is the rare film about alienation that is nevertheless tactile, visceral. We see Travis Bickle's world through the windows of the cab Schrader once called a "metal coffin," but we also feel the anger, the madness welling up. As "God's lonely man," De Niro is quiet, observant, nervous; the inaction on his face plays off the sleazy, vibrant buzz of the streets. It's clear all along that this kind of emotional paralysis will find an outlet somewhere.

Schrader's script is one thing on the page, and quite another on the screen. The lion's share of Schrader's dark thoughts makes it into the film intact, but around Bickle's head, Martin Scorsese builds Bickle's world, a dirty, frustrating, corrupt New York City, but a Scorsese city all the same, not always a Schrader city. And while Taxi Driver had been his most ambitious undertaking to date, Scorsese nevertheless brings the DNA from some of his earlier, smaller movies into the mix.

The power of TAXI DRIVER--which profoundly influenced some of the greatest filmmakers of the modern era, like Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Claire Denis, and Quentin Tarantino--is everflowing, the kind of movie that makes people start to care about movies yet is consistently rewarding and perplexing with each repeated viewing.

The unceasingly hostile treatment of blacks in Taxi Driver would have made more sense had it retained the ending of Schrader's original script, in which all the people massacred by Bickle at the brothel (including Iris's pimp) were black. Instead, viewers are left to process the cognitive dissonance of a film that softens them up for a racially motivated bloodbath, only for the race issue to quietly seep out of the film along with the dead, black stickup kid...

This is probably the Scorsese film I've seen the most times, but no matter how many times I revisit it, I keep noticing new things. Over time, what initially seemed a despairing arty-intellectual vigilante picture acquires tragic weight. Travis' worldview is conveyed in adolescent neo-noir terms, with Bernard Herrmann's score conveying the cornball Raymond Chandler aspects of Travis' mentality as well as undercurrents of depression, insecurity and motiveless rage.

It reveals itself to be not a masterpiece, but a film that plays as if it were made on a drug comedown. It has that obsessive, faded, disconnected tone, and the correlated occasional flashes of brilliance... The film seems not made in collaboration, but in a circle jerk. The bloodshed at the end is the payoff for three separate talents indulging in parallel fantasies, each at a different pace.

Hitchcockian unease permeates the film, but so too does a Godardian use of space and a Bressonian focus on obsession heighten the mounting sense of dread. These elements are groovy for film buffs but are mere icing on the proverbial cake; you don't need to be in the know to relish Scorsese's mastery of the form, and what may astonish even more than the creative prowess is how compulsively entertaining the results are.

Scorsese didn't direct Taxi Driver so much as orchestrate its elements. Lasting nearly 20 minutes and fueled by Bernard Herrmann's rhapsodic score, the de facto overture is a densely edited salmagundi of effects—slow motion, fragmenting close-ups, voluptuous camera moves, and trick camera placement—that may be the showiest pure filmmaking in any Hollywood movie since Touch of Evil.

The final messy shoot-out is gloriously, horrifyingly gory, and hasn't been scrubbed to death to save our stomachs (or worsen them). It still combines a kind of grindhouse blood (so red ... but in some cases, a repulsive brownish red), among the cheap plaid suits and Iris's hot pants, and remains so recklessly real and beautifully composed all at once.