Robert De Niro: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

1. Travis Bickle - Taxi Driver

The quintessential Robert De Niro performance will always be his haunted depiction of self-righteous loner Travis Bickle, who falls in love with an underage prostitute and attempts to assassinate a politician. In Taxi Driver, De Niro takes us into the dark heart of New York, enveloping us into the suffocating sleaze of the city. Bickle is appalled with the world he lives in and wishes to improve the conditions of the city, ridding it of corruption and exploitation. It would be easy for De Niro to play Bickle as a hysterical mad man, but the way he subtly displays his changing emotions prove why he is arguably the greatest actor of them all. Taxi Driver stands out for its individual scenes, most famously the scene where Bickle talks to himself in the mirror, continuing his mental downward spiral as he does so. Bickle, haircut aside, is an unremarkable and quiet man, but it is De Niro that makes him such a magnetic presence. It's a sad, humane performance of a man and the darkest creation of Scorsese, Schrader and De Niro.