Taxi Driver (1976)

About two years back, when I was going through the AFI list for 100 movies, I watched De Nero’s Taxi Driver and fell in love with it. As I checked out its trivia on IMDB, I came across the “theory” behind the movie. When Paul Schrader, the writer, was first writing the script, he believed that he was just writing about "loneliness," but as the process went on he realized he was writing about "the pathology of loneliness." His theory being that, for some reason, some "young men" (such as Schrader himself) subconsciously push others away to maintain their isolation, even though the main source of their torment is this very isolation. For reason, the theory stuck.

Taxi Driver (1976) is the story of Travis Bickle (De Nero), an ex-Marine and Vietnam War veteran living in New York City. Suffering from insomnia, he spent his time working as a cab-driver at night, and watching seedy porn and thinking about how the world had deteriorated into a cesspool by day. He was a loner and had strong opinions about what’s right and wrong with mankind. Spying on Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a worker on the presidential nomination campaign of Senator Charles Palatine, became the highlight of his day, until he asked her out and took her to watch to a sex education film. Not surprisingly, she broke it off with him. After that, Travis slipped more into his delusional world, becoming obsessed with guns and believing he has to do whatever he can to make the world a better place. A chance encounter with a 12-year old child prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster), trying to escape from her pimp Matthew (Harvey Keital) and his inability to act forced him further into his schizophrenia. Then, he became obsessed with saving her.

The climax of the movie is considered to be one of the bloodiest and most terrifying of all times. The movie was nominated for 4 Oscars, including Best Picture but lost to Stallone’s, Rocky. Merely a year after winning an Oscar, for the Best Supporting Actor, for the Godfather – Part II in 1975, De Nero received a nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role but lost to Peter Finch for the Network, the first person to receive a posthumous Oscar.