Taxi Driver is a remarkable achievement, a crazy, excessive, erratic masterpiece, but a masterpiece just the same. Scorsese has always interested me as a director, but he has also always annoyed me with his seeming inability to impose a cohesive structure upon his films. One of his chief weaknesses has been his tendency to play too many scenes at fever pitch. The absence of variation in the tone of Mean Streets and particularly Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore irrevocably undercut the genuine climaxes of both films. In Taxi Driver, confronted with volatile material which would readily lend itself to a similar treatment, Scorsese has wisely chosen the opposite tactic. He builds the film slowly, quietly, creating a mood of anxiety and imminent violence so that when the explosions finally occur within Travis Bickle's twisted psyche, the effect is all the more harrowing.

A positive side effect of this...