Anyone who has met Travis Bickle will never forget the encounter. And Travis himself cannot forget. Driven by the demons of loneliness, the young sleep-deprived Vietnam veteran makes his living in the New York nights. A job as a taxi driver is supposed to give him some inner peace, but results in the complete opposite. Both disgusted and captivated by the miserable “scum”, violence and bawdiness he witnesses, he starts developing fatal fantasies of being a redeemer: he gets in shape, acquires arms and first plans to assassinate a presidential candidate, before befriending a teenage prostitute who gives his mission a whole new perspective.
Paul Schrader, whose second screenplay set the leitmotif for his entire opus, drove a taxi himself while writing, and through Travis he also processed his own obsessions, religious doubts and the questions that haunted him as a young man. Under the fearless direction of a young, passionate Martin Scorsese and driven by the haunting performance of Robert de Niro, which oscillates between alert irritability and Weltschmerz, Taxi Driver became the disturbing must-see milestone of 1970s cinema and has consistently remained so until this day. (pj)
