Martin Scorsese
Taxi Driver

He is a Vietnam veteran, the young Travis Bickler. The war taught him a lot and took away many illusions, but it didn't defeat him completely. In his smile, there is still hope. And with his beautiful smile, he presents himself to ask for a job as a nighttime taxi driver, to try to keep his mind occupied during his sleepless nights.
He is not afraid of what awaits him. He believes that with the war he has truly seen it all. He will be very wrong.

What he is forced to see is dark, very different from the colorful lights of the advertising signs that frame them (in one of the most beautiful and ingenious visual contradictions in film history).

The young veteran makes various encounters in his taxi. He meets a husband with homicidal instincts (Martin Scorsese), but above all, he meets Senator Palantine who is working on his electoral campaign. The meeting with the senator is emblematic of Travis's realism-idealism: “This city is a cesspool, but you can clean it up”. Hoping in politics is the reason that keeps so many people on the brink of despair alive. Travis truly believes in it, and this keeps him calm.

We do not know what education Travis has received. For sure, when he meets the beautiful and sophisticated Betsy (Cybil Shepherd), our man does not look bad at all. His natural charisma immediately wins the woman’s heart. But Travis manages to ruin everything by taking her to a porn cinema. She leaves. It's the first stab that reopens his inner wound, the one from the war.

But it's not over. His idealistic soul is forced to see a young thirteen-year-old adolescent, Iris (Jodie Foster), living the life, under the control of the pimp Matthew (Harvey Keitel). The idealist Travis must try to redeem her and invites her to talk at a table – in one of the most tender scenes the cinema remembers. It's another stab inside his wound that is starting to bleed again.

Meanwhile, Travis discovers what lies behind the fine words of Senator Palantine. The failure with Betsy, the infamous exploitation of an innocent girl, and the terrible hypocrisy of politics definitively open his inner wound. The veteran has lost hope, that virtue that dies last. When hope dies, every principle that drives us to act well also dies. By now, hatred has taken over Travis’s mind and heart. And hatred will be the springboard towards his vigilante delirium.
Following Travis's murderous madness will be the almost comical madness of New York, which will elevate him to a popular hero, even if he knows he is not one and will say so to the only woman he truly cares about.

Much more than an (original) film against the Vietnam War and against America's contradictions, “Taxi Driver” is, above all, a film about the unpredictable despairing effects of loneliness (represented by the famous scene improvised by De Niro talking to the mirror because he has no one else to confide in); a (spiritual) loneliness that takes over a profoundly good and idealistic person, marked by a terrible wound that, instead of healing with human relationships and the right people, opens more and more due to continuous contact with the most rotten side of the society in which he is forced to live.

De Niro's acting is priceless (second choice of Scorsese after Dustin Hoffmann's refusal), in the most chameleonic performance of his career: deeply realistic in telling the senator that the Big Apple is a cesspool, but also naively idealistic in believing that the senator himself can transform it into the Garden of Eden; intelligent gentleman in talking to the refined Betsy but also stupid and perverted in taking her to the porn cinema; saint in trying to convince little Iris to leave “the life” and demon in giving in to his homicidal instincts. “A walking contradiction,” as a verse of the song "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33" (cited by De Niro in the meeting with Betsy) recites, and which Scorsese chose precisely because they perfectly described the multifaceted and contradictory character of the protagonist.

Much has been written about the ending. For most critics, the Travis who leaves Betsy saying: “I'm not a hero” represents a man finally serene and free from his past, paying homage to the theme of redemption so dear to Scorsese. And this is the substance. But the Italian-American director, in the beautiful interview “Inside the Actor's Studio”, wanted to give a more complex and realistic interpretation: “It is true, the ending of “Taxi Driver” is an Easter Sunday, and not a Good Friday like many of my other movies. But even though the man who leaves Betsy is really safe, with that double look at the rearview mirror he shows that he is not safe once and for all, but leaves open the possibility of returning to what he was before”. “Travis is a time bomb” (a nice and deep expression by Scorsese himself); it will be up to Travis not to detonate again. “No one is confirmed in grace” – teaches Catholic theology that Scorsese has studied and meditated since his youthful years in seminary – and it is this simple and profound truth that the director wanted to put as the final seal of his greatest masterpiece.