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| Taxi Driver |
By Ernestine MeltonMartin Scorsese may well be the greatest living filmmaker. If not, he at least ranks in the top tier of greatest directors of all time. Even when working with the fairly standard biopic genre material of The Aviator, or doing remakes like Cape Fear, he always creates a film that is simply fascinating to behold. When it comes to Taxi Driver, you could watch it on mute and still be intrigued, or with the sound up and your eyes closed, and the movie would remain enchanting.
There are few directors as capable of drawing you into their world, and throughout the course of this film, you'll feel as if you're right there in the seat next to Travis Bickle. The film has a very real feel to it. It is probably as close as you can get to the feeling of "found footage" without using some gimmick like handheld cameras or The Office style interviews between scenes.
The film is part of an unofficial trilogy of sorts with The Searchers and Paris, Texas. Both Scorsese's film and Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas are loose remakes of John Ford's The Searchers, and both of the main characters of the latter films, both named Travis, are loosely cast as John Wayne types. The whole trilogy works as an example of just how many different ways there are to tell a single story.
Where The Searchers is primarily an adventure film revolving around themes of prejudice and loneliness, where Wim Wenders chose to make a real, but sweet-hearted film about the reuniting of a family, Scorsese opts to highlight the darker aspects of the story, the sheer lonesomeness of the hero, the outsider. In all three stories, the lead takes it upon himself to do something he sees as heroic. In all three, the real morality of what he does is questionable, and in all three, the hero retreats from those he's saved at the end, always trying to find validation in heroics, but never able to join in.
Each film is a statement on loneliness, and this is why these characters are so easy to sympathize with. All three characters commit, or have committed, deeds that normal human beings would not take pride in, but you find yourself wanting them all to come out okay, even Travis Bickle, who is half hero and half sociopath, because we all know what it feels like to be so alone.
At one point or other, everyone has been in Travis Bickle's shoes. Most of us work it out with less extreme measures, but we've all known what it's like to be surrounded by so many people and still feel so isolated. We know exactly where Travis has been and while that doesn't forgive his crimes, we do understand him.
Few people are willing to talk about the darkest aspect of the film, because it involves looking at your own darker instincts: We root for Travis Bickle in the end. We shouldn't, but we do, because we wish he could be the hero, we wish the film was a western so that his simplistic moral compass would be correct. The tragedy is that it's not a western.
These three films serve as companion pieces to one another, but Taxi Driver also goes hand in hand with First Blood, which is also about a lonesome Vietnam veteran who uses violence as a way to solve issues of loneliness and seek validation.
There are few directors as capable of drawing you into their world, and throughout the course of this film, you'll feel as if you're right there in the seat next to Travis Bickle. The film has a very real feel to it. It is probably as close as you can get to the feeling of "found footage" without using some gimmick like handheld cameras or The Office style interviews between scenes.
The film is part of an unofficial trilogy of sorts with The Searchers and Paris, Texas. Both Scorsese's film and Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas are loose remakes of John Ford's The Searchers, and both of the main characters of the latter films, both named Travis, are loosely cast as John Wayne types. The whole trilogy works as an example of just how many different ways there are to tell a single story.
Where The Searchers is primarily an adventure film revolving around themes of prejudice and loneliness, where Wim Wenders chose to make a real, but sweet-hearted film about the reuniting of a family, Scorsese opts to highlight the darker aspects of the story, the sheer lonesomeness of the hero, the outsider. In all three stories, the lead takes it upon himself to do something he sees as heroic. In all three, the real morality of what he does is questionable, and in all three, the hero retreats from those he's saved at the end, always trying to find validation in heroics, but never able to join in.
Each film is a statement on loneliness, and this is why these characters are so easy to sympathize with. All three characters commit, or have committed, deeds that normal human beings would not take pride in, but you find yourself wanting them all to come out okay, even Travis Bickle, who is half hero and half sociopath, because we all know what it feels like to be so alone.
At one point or other, everyone has been in Travis Bickle's shoes. Most of us work it out with less extreme measures, but we've all known what it's like to be surrounded by so many people and still feel so isolated. We know exactly where Travis has been and while that doesn't forgive his crimes, we do understand him.
Few people are willing to talk about the darkest aspect of the film, because it involves looking at your own darker instincts: We root for Travis Bickle in the end. We shouldn't, but we do, because we wish he could be the hero, we wish the film was a western so that his simplistic moral compass would be correct. The tragedy is that it's not a western.
These three films serve as companion pieces to one another, but Taxi Driver also goes hand in hand with First Blood, which is also about a lonesome Vietnam veteran who uses violence as a way to solve issues of loneliness and seek validation.
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