Movie - Taxi Driver (1976)

This movie is so amazing that I don't feel like I should even attempt to write any kind of review about it... Someone else did, however, and you can read about it below or on IMDb.

I would, however, like to draw attention to the disclaimer at the end of the credits.
     TO OUR TELEVISION AUDIENCE: In the aftermath of violence, the distinction between hero and villain is sometimes a matter of interpretation or misinterpretation of facts. TAXI DRIVER suggests that tragic errors can be made. The Filmmakers.

I was as impressed with this statement as I was by the movie itself. However, I would like to add that it's not only in the aftermath that the distinction is vulnerable and subject to interpretation. Often times the people that commit terrible acts, such as this, believe, whether they are justified or not, that what they are doing is the ethical, moral, and/or responsible thing to do. Like other works, such as Se7en, Taxi Driver places the audience between the possibility that the main character is the good guy and the possibility that they are the bad guy. One asks whether Travis Bickle is the antagonist or the protagonist. When the moral fabric of society has degraded to the point that almost everyone is the bad guy, they seem like the good guy because they are living the status quo, and Bickle seems to be the bad guy because he refuses to conform, to not submit to the status quo. His character reminds me of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Because he recently returned from the war in Vietnam, he fights that battle at home in the only way he knows how to fight battles. Or perhaps he is simply suffering from post war mental instability, unable to separate who he was in Vietnam from who he is at home. Perhaps he is nothing more than a psychopath, disconnected from society as a result of the things he saw people do to each other in war.

IMDb Summary:
A mentally unstable Viet Nam war veteran works as a night-time taxi driver in New York City where the perceived decadence and sleaze feeds his urge for violent action, attempting to save a preadolescent prostitute in the process.

IMDb