Martin Scorsese
Taxi Driver

Born from violence and marginalization, Travis (Robert De Niro), a young Vietnam veteran, struggles with everyday life. Without a steady job and spending all day in front of the television in a dingy apartment, he finds no better job than being a night taxi driver in a New York submerged in crime. His usual clients are drug dealers, thieves, troublemakers, and prostitutes.

However, a particular encounter leads him to reconsider his condition as an eternal misfit, prompting him to become a vigilante. In his own way. Travis lives a meaningless life: he has no family, no friends, no relationship with his parents, whose birthdates he doesn't even remember. The job of a taxi driver, dangerous and poorly paid, is a real godsend. Either that or continue watching porn movies in some seedy cinema, also because the prospects are not the best: with some odd jobs and a "barely attended school" you don't get very far.

But one day comes the turning point: a woman enters his life. Betsy works on the election campaign of a certain Palantine, yet another politician running for the White House. He spends entire afternoons staring at her from his taxi, when he realizes it's time to find an excuse to strike up a conversation. He enters the office and, somehow, convinces her to go out together. What they have in common is unclear. He, ignorant and crude, makes jokes about orgasms, and the first (and last) evening together takes her to a porn cinema. She seems to have no expectations, except for the outcome of the exhausting election campaign. For Travis, it's just another fool's errand. Betsy and various politicians become the embodiment of a society that is all appearances and doesn't know what to do with an outcast like him.

The nights continue between prostitutes and dealers when, by pure chance, he notices a young girl (Jodie Foster). She wants to leave, her "boyfriend" forcibly takes her out of the taxi. The pimp, Matthew (Harvey Keitel), slips him twenty dollars for the "trouble," but Travis doesn't use them. Dirty money. And that's when the trigger goes off. For the first time, he has a purpose, to clean up the city, naturally in his own way. Palantine, the senator he supported during the campaign, is a bluff: one evening he gets in his taxi and reveals himself for what he is. Talks full of nothing, hypocritical, treats the young taxi driver like a friend but doesn't even know him. And Palantine, despite himself, ends up straight on the list of "trash to clean up" by the improvisational vigilante. The attempt to kill him ends terribly, also because it's hard not to get noticed by the security service if you go around with a mohawk, but at this point, there's no turning back.

If the senator is unreachable, the various low-level criminals from the ghettos are not. And here's where the young girl, Iris, the pimp, and the "dirty" twenty dollars come to mind. After "preparing" himself (the monologue in front of the mirror has become History), he goes, saves Iris, and causes a massacre. And here comes the paradox, the embodiment of the total hypocrisy of the society in which our anti-hero is forced to live: the maladjusted killer rises to the role of national-popular hero. Born from Vietnam, violence, and unemployment, transformed into a human wreck, he is "readmitted" to the same society that had excluded him for years, precisely thanks to that violence which for years had seen him as a protagonist, presented for the occasion by the press as a "longing for justice," though expressed with a 44 magnum. Hypocrisy? Perhaps.

Travis will also reunite with Betsy, now increasingly absorbed by her career, and in the end, he won't even charge her for the taxi ride. Almost as if to say: "without you (or rather, without your rejection) I wouldn't have done what I did." As a "good" anti-hero, despite the fifteen minutes of fame, he will remain, naturally, in the same squalor as always, but perhaps will be a little more satisfied. "Cult" film. And deservedly so.