Taxi Driver Review

Themes and their interpretations

Roger Ebert wrote about the movie’s end:

Many have discussed the ending. Here we see newspaper clippings about Travis “heroism” in saving Iris. Betsy rides into Travis’s cab and shows him her admiration, instead of her initial disgust. Could this be a fantasy scene or? Travis survived the shootout. Is it possible that we are experiencing his final thoughts? The sequence can be considered literal. … I’m not certain that these are the right questions. The end sequence plays like music, not drama: It completes the story on an emotional, not a literal, level. We end not on carnage but on redemption, which is the goal of so many of Scorsese’s characters.

James Berardinelli reviews the film and slams the dream-or fantasy interpretation.

Taxi Driver ends with the perfect epilogue by Scorsese as well as Paul Schrader, a writer. This epilogue of five minutes is full of irony and demonstrates the dark side to fate. Bickle is made into a hero by the media, but if he had drawn his pistol faster against Senator Palantine, it would have led to him being branded an assassin. The film ends with Bickle being portrayed as a model citizen, someone who fights drug dealers and pimps to save a little girl.

LaserDisc audio commentary , Scorsese acknowledged several critics ‘ interpretation of the film’s ending as being Bickle’s dying dream. Scorsese admits that Bickle’s last scene, in which he looks at an unidentified object, suggests that Bickle may fall into recklessness and anger in the future. He is also like a “ticking time bomb.”

Paul Schrader, writer for the 30th-anniversary DVD comments that Travis “isn’t cured by this movie’s end” and that “he won’t be a heroic hero next year.” Reddit’s Reddit forum asked Schrader what the ending meant. Schrader replied that it was not meant as a dream sequence. However, it is possible to see the movie as going back to its beginning, as if it were a spliced frame to the start of the movie, then it can be started over. Also, the film was associated with 1970s wave vigilante films. It is often cited as New Hollywood’s more civilized counterpart to the many exploitation vigilante flicks of the same decade.

Taxi Driver may have some similarities to 1970’s vigilante films, however, Taxi Driver is explicitly classified as a non-vigilante film.

There are positive things

After its initial release, A Taxi driver received positive reviews. Rotten Tomatoes gives it an approval score of 96%. Based on 28 reviews, the average rating was 7.3/10. According to the website’s critic consensus, “A Taxi Driver provides a ground-level view and a refreshingly lighter touch to a factual story with serious implications.” According to Metacritic, which calculates the normalized rating from reviews, this film scored 69/100. It was evaluated by 7 critics. The score indicates “generally favorable reviews”.

Sohing Yi Chen of OFF SCREEN noted that A Taxi Driver was “a film portraying a historical tragedy”, and encouraged the international audience to find out more, particularly those unfamiliar with this particular event.

Additionally, he suggested that by using a classic Hollywood narrative structure the film would allow audiences to feel the emotional rollercoaster that the film presents in an extremely workmanlike way.

Jennie Kermode from Eye For Film shared some of the pertinent ideas. The director did not ignore peaceful, lovely moments in addition to the horrendous scenes. It created an emotional contrast and allowed the audience to keep their shocks or take it into account.

This movie received some attention for its cinematography. Sheri Linden, of The Hollywood Reporter said that the film’s cinematography captured “metal-on–metal violence”, especially during the checkpoint scene. The mountain-road chase scene was also exaggerated with a “pastoral background” that helped Kim to make her decision more convincing.

Sheri Linden also dismissed the suspicions that Hinzpeter may have been overplaying his emotions. Sheri Linden evidencing found footage from Hinzpeter near the end of the movie, in order to verify the authenticity of her performance.

Edeltraut Behmstaedt is the widow and journalist Jurgen Hinzpeter. She was due to arrive in Seoul on the 8th of August 2017. Brahmstaedt hoped to attend the screening of the film that was based in part on the story of her deceased husband.

.Taxi Driver Review