Perhaps the most refreshing element of Raging Bull—and a plot structure that makes it feel decidedly old-fashioned—is that Scorsese and De Niro just allow protagonist Jake La Motta to be who he is without excessive exposition or moralizing. If this were a character study made in 2022, there would be a more thorough “origin story” to explain how La Motta became the Raging Bull, a boxer who did not even attempt defense, a man who refused to collaborate with the Mob to get a title shot and also a husband with rage and violence issues. Instead, the viewer gets to craft the reasons for La Motta’s various antics. In an era where every fictional character is psychologized—ditto most sports stars—La Motta is instead portrayed in a series of vignettes that capture him in both his athletic prime and his post-fighting slide into disaster without hand-holding and ham-fisted over-explanation. Even while the film is a clear condemnation of what is today called toxic masculinity, it makes its critique without battering the viewer as unrelentingly as La Motta did poor Tony Janiro in the film.
In a lot of ways, Raging Bull is anomalous for both Scorsese and De Niro. Sure, it is yet another masterful collaboration between the two, with Joe Pesci joining them for the first time. They again make use of the screenwriting talents of Paul Schrader. But it is a sports movie, something neither one did again (and a career choice so surprising on Scorsese’s part that the Coen brothers used it as the foundational joke of Barton Fink). It also features a romance at the center of the story, another plot device that both the actor and director generally avoided. In fact, while certain websites have correctly argued that De Niro is the greatest actor of all time, even watching the legendary thespian kissing Cathy Moriarty (as La Motta’s second wife, Vickie) is pretty gross, perhaps even worse than his awkward scenes with Amy Brenneman in Heat. De Niro is a genius and master craftsman, but he has never done a love story that a viewer would believe.
Yet Raging Bull, in spite of its premises and narrative elements, is undeniably a Martin Scorsese film. First, there is the whole Italian-American in New York aspect. But really it comes down to a matter of craft. There is, most of all, the virtuosic oner accompanying Jake on his electric walk from his locker room through a heaving crowd of fans and into the ring for his first title fight, a warmup to Scorsese’s even more famous Copacabana scene in Goodfellas. It is the sort of shot to savor and re-watch and is as impressive on the tenth viewing as the first. There is also the reinvention of film grammar and the rules of editing in the fight scenes, particularly the final Sugar Ray Robinson match with the dozens of cuts per minute it featured. Only a filmmaker as bold and self-assured as Scorsese would have dared such tactics.
The role of Jake La Motta is among De Niro’s most impressive. It is rightfully castigated today to equate a huge physical transformation with brilliant acting. But the truly stunning metamorphosis of De Niro from cut-from-granite prizefighter to over-the-hill bloated retired Floridian—with both manifestations of De Niro-as-La Motta revealed in contrast in Raging Bull’s first two scenes—is only part of his celebrated performance here. When playing the athlete, De Niro dances in the ring with both agility and menace. When playing the husband, he seethes with irrational jealousy, ever on the precipice of exploding in blind anger. As the retired fighter and club owner, De Niro is proud and more contained, but the violence of the pugilist is still visible in his posture and expressions. In the final time line of the film, when La Motta is now a failed businessman and ex-con pathetically emceeing to open for third-tier musicians, De Niro has slumped shoulders and a defeated face, but remains proud and aware of the power of his fists. In the film, De Niro effectively plays four men in two radically different bodies—to gain all that weight (about 60 pounds), he moved to Tuscany for several months and never stopped eating pasta, pastries, wine and ice cream—and that is what makes it such a famed performance.
Raging Bull is heralded as one of the greatest films of all time—it just does manage to crack the top 25 on the fairly exhaustive TSPDT list—and is among the five (…six?) canonical works that Scorsese and De Niro made together. It completely re-invented the way action sequences could be shot and edited. It regularly ranks as among the greatest sports movies, even though Scorsese knew basically nothing about boxing before taking on the project. It also expresses its fable of masculinity-run-amok, the very stuff some of the best cultural products—Mad Men,Moby Dick and There Will Be Blood, to pick three of hundreds—is made about, effectively.
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