"Not everyone was ready for this soulful, tragic odyssey into violence and loneliness, with Robert De Niro starring as Travis Bickle, a cabbie who longs to wash the scum off the streets like a merciless rainstorm. He wants to do right but doesn't know how. The scarred Vietnam vet muses about assassinating a politician who represents the corrupt overall system to him, but he also becomes transfixed by a child prostitute (Jodie Foster),"
"Taxi Driver found its audience despite the controversy-or perhaps because of it. The film was hailed by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, a critic so respected that her praise alone could propel a filmmaker's entire career (ask Brian De Palma). "Scorsese, with his sultry moodiness and his appetite for the pulp sensationalism of forties movies, is just the director to define an American underground man's resentment," Kael wrote in her assessment, parts of which were used in ads for the movie."
Taxi Driver opened at the Coronet Theatre in Manhattan on February 9, 1976, then expanded nationwide. The film follows Travis Bickle, a scarred Vietnam veteran and cab driver who becomes consumed by loneliness and violent fantasies of cleansing the city's corruption. He contemplates assassinating a politician and fixates on rescuing a child prostitute from her pimp, actions that lead to a bloody climax with ambiguous moral outcomes and no obvious civic improvement. The film polarized critics but found an audience; strong praise from influential critics and the reputations of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro helped secure its standing as a major 20th-century film.
Read at Esquire
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