Taxi Driver Review

Schrader wrote this out of his own isolation and it shows in the diary structure, a voice explaining itself to nobody in prose that keeps sliding from grievance into scripture. Michael Chapman shoots Manhattan through rain-smeared glass and neon reflection, with slow lateral drifts that pull away from Travis at exactly the moments a conventional film would push in, as though the camera cannot stand to keep watching. Bernard Herrmann's final score sets a drowsy saxophone against a snare figure that never resolves, romance and threat in the same cue.

De Niro's achievement is that Travis has no stable interior for the audience to hold, so the mirror improvisation reads as a man auditioning for a self. Jodie Foster and Harvey Keitel make the Iris scenes genuinely squalid rather than symbolic. The plot is a drift with two possible endpoints, and Scorsese takes both. The desaturated massacre and the newspaper clippings that follow leave the film's final judgment deliberately, uncomfortably unmade.