Scorsese’s boxing drama is still an American classic...
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci
Running time: 129 minutes
Raging Bull pops you with its rhythmic jabs, takes the wind out of you with crushing body shots, and then turns out the lights with a swinging haymaker. It took me a while to drag myself up from the canvas after my first viewing over a decade ago. Martin Scorsese's masterwork recalibrated my cinematic sensibilities with the blunt force trauma of its brutal poetry and striking black-and-white imagery.
Audiences have always been captivated by the gladiatorial slogs of the underdog, the ecstasy of a jeering crowd as a is soul being laid naked before their eyes. From his humble beginnings living in the Bronx tenements to becoming middleweight champion, Jake LaMotta's story sounds like it would make a rousing crowd pleaser - if he wasn’t forever compromising his extraordinary achievements in the ring with crippling jealousy and self-sabotage outside of it. Robert De Niro ensures that this prize-fighter never so much as looks at a pedestal with his unrelenting portrait of a lab of pulverised flesh in a truly haunting turn. In Raging Bull, prize-fighting is a nihilistic manifestation of a man's ritual punishment which bleeds beyond the ropes.
The boxing scenes are as dynamic as they are violent, but the complex relationships between the central characters turn the film into a harrowing psychodrama. De Niro's performance speaks for itself, but he never steals the show. Joe Pesci simmers in his first major role as Joey, Jake's younger brother, manager, and psychological (sometimes psychical) punching bag. The two actors have dangerous chemistry which brings an unpredictability to their quarrels about women, Jake's weight problems, and Joey's gangster pals. It would be easy for us to feel sorry for Jake's beast of burden, if it wasn’t for his and Joey's shared repugnant misogyny. Pesci’s delivery of lines like "I’d fuck anything" fill us with uneasy laughter, but it highlights the fraught sexism of their environment, and Joey's role as an enabler for Jake's problems.
This cinematic endurance test ends with a dishevelled, overweight LaMotta skulking around dive bars doing a tired stand-up routine. Rags to riches to rags - I've always felt that Scorsese operates at his best in this model
Vicky LaMotta, Jake's second wife, is the third party in this exercise in masochism. He was 23 and she was just fifteen when they met at a public swimming pool in the Bronx, making their relationship transgressive from the outset. Scorsese captures their moments of intimacy with an unsettling frankness, and even their brief flashes of joy - captured with a home-video montage in the film's only use of colour - is tainted by feelings of melancholy, and foregone conclusions drag out with a dull ache. Despite being subjugated to all of Jake's paranoia and sexual insecurities, Vicky never truly feels like a victim thanks to Cathy Moriarity’s assured screen debut. At the age of twenty, she more than holds her own against a domineering De Niro, who is ultimately unable to grind her down like the rest of them.
Scorsese lets the domestic chaos unfold with a neorealistic frankness which feels intrusive, but the boxing scenes - as dynamic as they are violent - feel anything but real. By using his camera with ferocious kineticism, the scrutinising explosions of camera flashbulbs, slow-motion blood baptisms, and the piercing sounds of the bell, Jake's battles feel like spiritual exorcisms. Michael Chapman's mercurial black-and-white photography crystalises the theatre of pain. Perhaps the most important technical feat in Raging Bull is Thelma Schoonmaker’s fractured editing style, in what would be the start of one of cinema's most beautiful friendships. One edit will forever stick in my mind: Vicky and Jake are reconciling after a huge fight, done with almost no dialogue and complete silence, but Schoonmaker suddenly cuts to Jake being belted in the face by one of his opponents. This is just one example of the discombobulating cuts; the tension comes from the fact that we don’t know where or when the next punch will land.
This cinematic endurance test ends with a dishevelled, overweight LaMotta skulking around dive bars doing a tired stand-up routine. Rags to riches to rags - I've always felt that Scorsese operates at his best in this model. Take Goodfellas and The Irishman as examples - these ethereal retrospective operas offer no judgment, no sympathy, simply allowing a deeply problematic man to be human, whether we like it or not. Raging Bull is the springboard for these other narratives, but with its technical prowess and performances of extreme psychicality, it still feels like a magnum opus that Scorsese has never bettered.
Raging Bull - 4K Restoration showed at Broadway Cinema on Friday 21 April
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