Martin Scorsese
Taxi Driver

"Taxi Driver was my first screenplay [...] and I wrote it as self-therapy because I was really in a dark place in my life, drinking and driving, I had no place to live, and kept a gun in the car".(Paul Schrader)

A seminal work, one of the most important in the history of cinema, a monolith of the New Hollywood (so much as to mark a before and after it), "Taxi Driver" made Scorsese a world-renowned director (though he already had a notable film, "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore") and turned De Niro into a top-level star, despite him also having an Oscar to his name ("The Godfather Part II") and some box office success.

In the mid-'70s, audiences demanded cinema to tell the truth, even if it was unpleasant and rotten, tired for a long time of colorful musicals, good feelings, and happy endings at all costs. The first American film that delved into the suburbs and portrayed the world of the proletariat, sometimes subproletariat, in New York was, twenty years before, "Marty," but the tone was that of a comedy and an optimism in the style of Frank Capra, by then quite outdated. New Hollywood (which counted among its, albeit unintentional, founders Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Sidney Pollack, John Milius, Brian De Palma, just to name a few), like neorealism thirty years earlier, wanted to get its hands dirty by telling the reality without frills. But, of course, neorealism depicted a poor Italy destroyed by the hunger of the post-war period, while New Hollywood portrayed a violent, resentful America, betrayed by the American Dream that had now become a Nightmare, incapable of dreaming and divided by an almost apocalyptic difference in social classes, where the underbelly of society was truly the underbelly, while the upper class traveled serenely, unaware of the consequences, in the roaring, and "plastic", eighties (those of "Wall Street" by Oliver Stone, 1987).

Scorsese reads Schrader's script and is struck by it. In narrating the story of Travis Bickle, who fought in Vietnam, has seen too much, and can no longer sleep, the director tells a piece of America that the big production companies would have gladly avoided (just as the record companies would, at the time, have gladly avoided the punk anger, but the youth movement was bubbling and it certainly couldn't be ignored). The nocturnal New York seen from the rearview mirror of Bickle's taxi is ghostly and at the same time anonymous. Pimps, prostitutes, murderers, and drifters roam like ghosts in the darkness of indifference, each without a future, assuming they ever had one, each with their own burden of piercing despair (see Harvey Keitel's character, a pimp who conceals his feelings almost with self-destructive force), where soliciting sexual favors from a minor seems, perhaps, the only salvation (Jodie Foster's debut, electrifying).

The director moves the camera almost without hurry, he wants to follow his characters but, at times, makes us understand that not even he (and therefore we, an old voyeuristic technique assimilated from Hitchcock) can go beyond, and know more, as in the scene where Brickle is on the phone, the camera moves toward an empty corridor as if something were about to happen at any moment, but instead nothing happens, it was just a matter of modesty, discretion.

The discussion becomes, obviously, political. Brickle wants to fix New York's ugliness with force, and becomes a vigilante of the night. He wants to kill a politician and, with a Mohawk cut, he even tries. Sure, if film producers wanted to avoid the portrayal of American urban violence, so did the stars and stripes politics, coming out badly bruised from the Watergate scandal, the underworld of the metropolitan jungle would have wanted to avoid it, but, you know, votes need to be taken even from there. However, it is an evil world, and there is no place for the hope of love, let alone that of politics.

Jazz atmospheres, neon lights, a very bloody, very violent, scream-inducing ending, the final score by the Hitchcockian (see above) Bernard Herrmann, "Taxi Driver" marked many points in favor of a completely renewed and, in its own way, shocking cinema, so much as to create internal and external debates (in Italy it was a box office record, provoking the indignant reaction of a bourgeois audience that did not accept such exasperated, but necessary, violence in cinema) and earned Scorsese the Palme d'Or at Cannes (nothing at the Oscars) and an honored place in the history of cinema. Just like the famous "you talkin' to me?", improvised at the moment by a stunning Robert De Niro.