On every street in every city, there’s a nobody who dreams of being a somebody.
Saw the movie Taxi Driver directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro. De Niro plays Travis, a Viet returned Marine who is working as a night shift cabbie in NYC. He seems mentally disturbed. Night after night he keeps seeing the scum of the city. Soon, he starts to feel that he has the responsibility of cleaning it all up.
Taxi Driver is the first Scorsese movie I’ve watched. It’s explicit, serious and gritty. I was impressed, though the subject/genre is not to my liking. The young De Niro totally gets into the skin of his taxi driver role. Hats off to his intense acting. The movie also stars a very young Jodie Foster as a hooker whose life Travis thinks he is saving. The cinematography is top notch, though it goes almost unnoticed since it is competing with De Niro’s descent into insanity. There is a lot of debate about the movie’s ending. IMO the ending is a fantasy sequence. Travis didn’t survive and even then he wouldn’t have earned so much respect.