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You always hear that Martin Scorsese is the best living filmmaker, and while that's really up to the individual viewer, you have to concede that he at least ranks in the top tier of movie directors of all time, alongside Kubrick, Hitchcock and Coppola. Whether he's doing his own original material as in Mean Streets or remakes like The Departed, he always puts a personal touch on the film. Taxi Driver is one of his best.

There are few directors as capable of drawing you into their world, and throughout the course of this film, you'll feel as if you're right there in the seat next to Travis Bickle. The film has a very real feel to it. It is probably as close as you can get to the feeling of "found footage" without using some gimmick like handheld cameras or The Office style interviews between scenes.

The film stands as the second entry in something of a trilogy of films alongside The Searchers and Paris, Texas. All three films use essentially the same outline for their stories, and both Scorsese's film and Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas are considered loose remakes of The Searchers. The trilogy stands as a testament to how many different ways there are to tell a story, proving that old axiom that a movie isn't about what it's about, it's about how it's about it.

Where The Searchers is primarily an adventure film revolving around themes of prejudice and loneliness, where Wim Wenders chose to make a real, but sweet-hearted film about the reuniting of a family, Scorsese opts to highlight the darker aspects of the story, the sheer lonesomeness of the hero, the outsider. In all three stories, the lead takes it upon himself to do something he sees as heroic. In all three, the real morality of what he does is questionable, and in all three, the hero retreats from those he's saved at the end, always trying to find validation in heroics, but never able to join in.

Each film is a statement on loneliness, and this is why these characters are so easy to sympathize with. All three characters commit, or have committed, deeds that normal human beings would not take pride in, but you find yourself wanting them all to come out okay, even Travis Bickle, who is half hero and half sociopath, because we all know what it feels like to be so alone.

At one point or other, everyone has been in Travis Bickle's shoes. Most of us work it out with less extreme measures, but we've all known what it's like to be surrounded by so many people and still feel so isolated. We know exactly where Travis has been and while that doesn't forgive his crimes, we do understand him.

What many people don't talk about in regards to this film really is that there's a part of you that roots for Travis, even as he commits serious acts of violence at the end. We wish that we could cast the film as a simple cowboys and Indians tale of right and wrong. The tragedy is that it's just not that simple.

While the film serves as part of a trilogy to The Searchers and Paris, Texas, it's also something of a companion piece to First Blood, another film about a lonely Vietnam veteran who uses violence as a means of personal validation.

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