Taxi Driver, once again. It holds up, but not perfectly. I don't see it as uncritically as I did in the seventies. If DeNiro's Travis Bickle is so repulsed by the night-time street life of seventies New York City, and so drawn to the purity he thinks he sees in Cybil Shepherd's Betsy, would he really make a habit of going to X-rated, hardcore films, and—what is even weirder—take Betsy to one? And why does he turn against Palantine? Is it a matter of “If I can't have Betsy for a girlfriend, he can't have her (political) allegiance, because he'll be dead”? I don't know. Maybe. Palantine may be a phony but there's no indication that Travis's political antennae, if he even has any, are especially sensitive. As for the massacre near the end, it is plausible that Travis would carry it out; it is not plausible that Harvey Keitel's character would keep coming after Travis after being shot point-blank in his midsection. And the aftermath of the massacre, when Travis has killed three men with no legal consequences and become a media hero—well, it more or less went down that way with Kyle Rittenhouse, not to mention that Zimmerman character. But those cases took place in a political and legal landscape shaped by an ascendant racist/fascist right wing. I would think that in Ford-era New York City, the legal system would look at three murders as three murders, even if the deceased were themselves criminal. Of course I don't know that much about seventies New York City, except that it was crime-ridden and going broke. Maybe the system would have gone easy on Travis, but I doubt there would have been no charges at all.
Anyway...the film still works, due in no small part to the performances of the four principals. DeNiro, Shepherd, Foster and Keitel are good-to-excellent. But I don't think you have to sacrifice plausibility to put across a story of a man so lonely and pissed off that he's bound to erupt in a hail of ordnance. Such men are legion, more so now than in 1976. It is interesting that nowadays the men who would marry their guns if they could seem to come more from suburban and rural places than from places like New York City. Terence Malick might have seen that coming; I don't know that Paul Schrader or Scorsese did. Although, come to think of it, Schrader conceived of Travis as a transplant from the Midwest.