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Yet somehow it is all too heavy with easy sociologizing to be truly moving. The taxi driver's shift from lonely neurotic to killer is yawningly predictable—no more informative than a Sunday supplement piece on the mind of the assassin. (Travis keeps a diary, just as Arthur Bremer did before he shot George Wallace.) What Scorsese is good at is moments—chance encounters between unlikely characters, awkward conversations between ignorant people, men and women trying, often with comic poignancy, to understand a world in which the old verities offer neither guidance nor insight. He can be an effective film maker, given a loose, unpretentious story like Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, where there is less temptation to make grand statements about the modern condition. He seems to need scripts with well-designed humor and performers with the spirit of Ellen Burstyn to compensate for what seems to be a fundamentally depressed view of life and the belief that sobriety is the equivalent of seriousness.
Mean Streets first showed the conflict between Scorsese's natural gift for human observation and his attraction to social and psychological statements.
Unfortunately, social comment does not come easily to him, and the strain shows.
It is a conflict he can resolve only in a violence that seems forced and—coming after so much dreariness—ridiculously pyrotechnical.
Richard Schickel