The movie Quentin Tarantino called “the greatest character study ever committed to film”
Quentin Tarantino’s movies feature some of the most memorable characters in contemporary film history. In several brilliant movies, Tarantino has documented the backgrounds and storylines of some truly brilliant fictional figures from a wide range of eras.
His early works like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs showed the kind of shady characters that dominated the underground crime circuit of Los Angeles in the 1990s, while the people present in Django Unchained helped to showcase the awful racism of centuries gone by, and Inglourious Basterds imagined the kind of crazy figures that World War II might have coughed up.
However, it’s fair to say that Tarantino has never really delivered a character study as such seeing as his films normally delve into the stories of many interconnected characters. That’s not to say that Tarantino isn’t appreciative of a character study, though, because he once named a film that serves as the greatest of such a film category.
It’s well known that Tarantino has both a deep love for the medium of cinema itself and a broad knowledge of its history, and he’s never been afraid of offering his admiration for the big-hitting movies as well as the unknown gems and the director once spoke of his love for Martin Scorsese’s 1976 neo-noir psychological thriller Taxi Driver.
“One of the things about Taxi Driver [is] that it is just so magnificent,” Tarantino had once said when introducing the film on Sky Movies. “I actually do feel that it may be the greatest first-person character study ever committed to film. I mean, I really actually can’t even think of a second, or a third or a fourth that can even come into contention with it.”
Taxi Driver, written by Paul Schrader, sees Robert De Niro play one of his most iconic roles as Travis Bickle, a returning home Vietnam War solider in the throes of serious trauma and PTSD who takes a job as a late-night cab driver in New York City, a metropolitan dystopia run down with dirt, crime and moral decay.
As the film progresses, Travis’ mental state worsens severely, and he becomes obsessed with a female political campaigner and a young child prostitute. Travis ultimately wants to help those around him, but his experience in Vietnam and his distaste for modern America cause him to become increasingly paranoid and violent.
There’s a genuine darkness to Taxi Driver that lends it its shockingly violent quality and also its dream/nightmare aesthetic quality, and this is something that Tarantino was also wildly impressed with, noting, “Scorsese, at this time of his career, had a connection to cinema and no matter how dark the material was, there was such an exuberance to filmmaking”.
While Taxi Driver is indeed the greatest character study in cinema according to Tarantino, he had also been taken with the finer details of the movie, later adding, “What’s such a forward thrust of this first-person character, one of the things that’s so fascinating about it is all the other little bits that find itself in the movie that serve at completely at odds with this tone of a madman’s diary, which is more or less what we’re dealing with here.”
So, if an intense character study is what you’re after, then Quentin Tarantino would urge you to begin with Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece thriller Taxi Driver.
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