The 1976 Martin Scorsese thriller that set his career on fire is a Netflix must: ‘Taxi Driver’
Taxi Driver has now become that film where most people know the references before they know the film itself like Robert De Niro and the mirror scene.
All of that has been absorbed into popular culture at this stage. The actual story is a different conversation altogether, which is probably why people still keep watching it fifty years later. How was it when you expected a crime thriller and got something so much darker?
When Taxi Driver came out in 1976, Martin Scorsese was already getting noticed because of films such as Mean Streets, but Taxi Driver is the one that changed everything. This was the film that had people on their toes. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, picked up Oscar nominations and turned Scorsese into one of the most talked-about directors around. Nearly fifty years later, people are still picking it apart, which probably tells you everything you need to know.
De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a Vietnam veteran who is struggling badly with insomnia. And this isn’t that toss-and-turn-for-an-hour type thing. The man barely sleeps at all. So he ends up taking a job driving a taxi through New York at night, which means he spends most of his time drifting around the city watching people come and go. At first, it just seems like a normal person trying to fill his nights, but then you start realising how isolated he is. The more time Travis spends on his own, the more detached he becomes from everybody around him.
And just when you are adjusting to his new routine, you watch him become fixated on Betsy (Cybill Shepherd). She works on a political campaign, and for reasons that mostly make sense in Travis’s head, he decides she is different from everybody else. You can tell pretty quickly that he has built up this version of her that doesn’t really exist. Around the same time, he comes across Iris, played by Jodie Foster, a 12-year-old girl who is being exploited by a pimp called Sport. From there, Travis starts convincing himself he has got a purpose. The problem is that every decision he makes afterwards leads him to a darker path.
One thing that makes the film even more interesting is the fact that Martin Scorsese didn’t actually write it. The screenplay came from Paul Schrader, who was going through a rough patch when he put it together. He had spoken for years about dealing with loneliness and depression. Once you know that, a lot about Travis starts clicking into place. He doesn’t feel like a traditional movie character.
Another thing people are always surprised by is Jodie Foster’s age. She was only 12 when filming started. Twelve. Considering the role she was playing, that obviously created a few complications during production, so her older sister Connie Foster played as her body double for certain scenes. Jodie still ended up earning an Oscar nomination for her performance, which is ridiculous when you remember how young she was.
The New York in Taxi Driver deserves a mention as well because it’s nothing like the version tourists know today. The city was rough and falling apart in places. Crime was high, and people had no money, and Scorsese uses all of that throughout the film. Now that’s what we call cinema.
Looking back now, Taxi Driver doesn’t really feel like the start of Scorsese’s career. It felt like he had finally arrived. He would then go on making masterpieces like Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino and plenty of other classics afterwards, but this was the film that announced his arrival. And if you’ve never watched it before, it’s still one of the easiest places to understand why people rate Martin Scorsese so highly in the first place.