A Look At Taxi Driver With Jodie Foster And Robert De Niro

Martin 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 stands as the second entry in something of a trilogy of films alongside The Searchers and Paris, Texas. All three films use essentially the same outline for their stories, and both Scorsese’s film and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas are considered loose remakes of The Searchers. The trilogy stands as a testament to how many different ways there are to tell a story, proving that old axiom that a movie isn’t about what it’s about, it’s about how it’s about it.

The Searchers is an adventure film rotating around the themes of racism and lonesomeness. Paris, Texas takes a similar story and tells it in a sweet way, focusing on issues of lonesomeness and family, and Scorsese focuses on lonesomeness and the use of violence as a means of personal validation. In all three, the heroes serve as escorts, attempting to rescue people and put them where they need to be, reuniting them with their families, but in all three, the heroes must leave once more in the end, forever alone.

Each of these films is its own statement on the nature of loneliness, and it’s because of this that the heroes are all so easy to sympathize with. What Travis Bickle does in the film is certainly not something most of us would ever take part in, but you find yourself wanting him to come out okay, nevertheless, simply because we all know that lonesomeness, that need for validation.

Everyone, sooner or later, feels that intense, terrible loneliness. That feeling that, even though you’re surrounded by other people, you’re trapped in a little bubble and incapable of breaking out and truly connecting with anyone. This is where Travis is stuck in his life, and we know that that can drive a person crazy.

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.

While the film serves as part of a trilogy to The Searchers and Paris, Texas, it’s also something of a companion piece to First Blood, another film about a lonely Vietnam veteran who uses violence as a means of personal validation.

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