With one of the greatest film scores ever, a simple, sad saxophone line written by Bernard Hermann, TAXI DRIVER announces its presence in the smoke and light of the nights of New York City circa the mid-1970s. Its hero is Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a solitary figure who shares his thoughts with us via a narration of his journal entries. Because he can’t sleep, he accepts work as a night shift taxi driver. Both elements underscore the character’s loneliness; he can work “Anywhere, anytime,” because he is tied to no other human being on earth, and where someone else might have suggested medical treatment for his insomnia, Travis just decides to ignore the problem and keep himself occupied.

For me, TAXI DRIVER is a perfectly calculated descent. Some pictures chart character’s rises and falls, most merely chart one’s ascent, but few are so resolutely attuned to slow, unalterable decline. De Niro’s character seems almost a pathetic creature at first - particularly in his interactions with Cybil Shepherd’s Betsy - so that it becomes far harder than it should be to distance yourself from the actions he takes in the film’s final act. When he first talks to Betsy, he is insightful and sincere, and as a result, she eventually agrees to go on a date with him. But Travis’ idea of a movie date is a seedy porn, and things go as bad as you’d imagine. It’s just one of the character’s many fascinating contradictions: he claims to understand people, and occasionally does show an insight into the psyche that comes from relentless observation of human interaction, while other times Travis acts as if he has no clue in the world how a person operates in society. But then this is also the man who deplores the scum and filth he sees in the streets of his city and spends what little free time he has in porno theaters.

“Everyone in life should have a place to go,” Travis says, and yet, while he is constantly the man who takes others where they have to go, he is utterly directionless. After he fouls up his relationship with Betsy, he flounders more and more desperately for some sort of purpose. He pursues assassinating the presidential candidate who Betsy worked for, but a few scenes before he spoke with admiration to the man in the back of his cab, as if he has less of a reason to kill the man than to desperately emulate others who have purpose. Eventually, his cause becomes saving a young prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster) from the clutches of her pimp named Sport (Harvey Keitel), but she doesn’t always seem convinced that she needs to be saved.

De Niro lost the Oscar for TAXI DRIVER to the also-deserving (though probably more deserving of a supporting award) Peter Finch, but it is his performance that is among the most well-known in movie history. “You talking to me?” has become one of the defining elements of his persona, and it’s here where you can see the depth and range that his recent dramas (THE SCORE, CITY BY THE SEA) have sorely lacked. So pathetic early in the picture, De Niro’s Travis slowly begins to scare the hell out of us. The most frightening moment in the picture to me is the scene where, while scoping out the candidate for future assassinating, he talks to a Secret Service agent. While nothing he says is overtly disturbing, there is a glimmer in his eyes that is absolutely terrifying.

TAXI DRIVER always feels a little vague to me, and in other movies that quality drives me crazy, but watching it always tantalizes me with questions I can never quite fully know. Where does his racism come from? What was he like before Vietnam? How much of what he says to Senator Palantine is real and how much is not? Is the ending actually happening? A dream? Some mixture of the two? I will likely never know but wrestling with these questions are what make TAXI DRIVER such a great film, one preferably seen on a beat up old print, where the scum, the filth, they seem just out of reach staring you right in the face.