'You talkin' to me?' (Taxi Driver (DVD))

Member Name: Moominpapa

Product:	Taxi Driver (DVD)
Date:	19/01/01 (60 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amazing direction by Scorsese

Disadvantages: The child prostectution is very controvercial

It's the last line, 'Well I'm the only one here,' that never gets quoted. It's the truest line in the entire film. Martin Scorsese's study in social alienation is one of the landmark films in post-war cinema, and expressionistic masterpiece with loneliness in its heart and around its brittle edges, a zeitgeist so powerful that Taxi Driver probably sums up America in the 1970s better than any movie.

Travis Bickle exists in Taxi Driver as a character with a desperate need to make some kind of contact somehow, to share or mimic the effortless social interaction he sees all around him, but can't participate in. He's a 'Nam vet, cocooned in his own world of fantasy and bigotry in the socially fragmented world of late-night New York.

The director of photography Michael Chapman, envisions the menacing city as a world of expressionistic colour, and insubstantial, hallucinatory place in the taxi driver's solipsistic mind. Shifting superimpositions of the neon landscape are achieved with camera movement and an out-of-focus lens, and wavering streaks, like scribbled colours, appear in shots taken through the water on the windshield.

Scorsese directs Travis' world in a stoned haze. Characters wander in and out but Scorsese never allows us to know them. We’re trapped in here with him, forced to endure his embarrassments, listen to his prejudices and share in his pitiful action man role-playing.

Though Paul Schrader's script has high-minded pretensions toward being existential treatise on urban alienation, it's the touches Scorsese welded on that amplify its power: its examination of celebrity, of purification, of the post-Vietnam malaise, of presidential politics. It melts together to form one of the greatest films made in the 70s.

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