Raging Bull (1980)
Directed by Martin Scorsese

Film Review

When Robert De Niro asked director Martin Scorsese whether he would like to make a film based on an autobiography by the former boxing champion Jake La Motta he received an unequivocal response.  Scorsese had no interest in sport and found nothing in La Motta's character or career that would induce him to make a film about him.  This was about the time Scorsese was working on Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.   Five years on, despite one massive success - Taxi Driver (1976) - Scorsese felt his career was over and was persuaded by producer Irwin Winkler to adapt La Motta's book, purely for De Niro's benefit.  Perhaps, feeling that the best of his career was behind him, Scorsese saw something of himself in the boxer's tragic decline from his all-too-brief moment of glory.  Certainly, Raging Bull was to be one of the director's most personal and intense films.  It is also, arguably, his one true masterpiece, one of the finest American films of the 1980s - an ugly film to crown an ugly decade.

Raging Bull is a film that pulls absolutely no punches.  It tells Jake La Motta's life story as it was lived and makes no attempt to gloss over the less attractive aspects of the boxer's life and temperament.  Photographed in grainy black and white (in a way that resembles a low budget European art film of the early 1960s), the film has a viscerally raw, almost documentary-like, feel to it which is perfectly in keeping with its subject matter.  The stark realism of the boxing scenes (heightened by some slick camerawork and razor-sharp editing) gives them a near-the-knuckle brutality that borders on sadism.  So successfully does Scorsese convey the primal savagery of what some still consider to be a noble sport that some of the sequences set in the boxing ring are an agony to sit through.  And yet the film's depiction of La Motta's life outside the ring is just as uncompromisingly tough and harrowing.  Scorsese and his screenwriter Paul Schrader do not waste time trying to make La Motta into something he wasn't.  The picture they paint of the boxer is a man constantly at war with himself and the world, a man incapable of sharing true intimacy with anyone else and who was always at the mercy of his primitive macho instincts.  It was La Motta who first described himself as a raging bull, and this is exactly how the film portrays him: a wild, untamable force of nature.

If Raging Bull's no-nonsense treatment of its grim subject matter is inclined to turn its audience away in disgust, Robert De Niro's powerhouse performance compels us to keep watching, to take the punishment the film doles out to us like a boxer taking a repeated slugging in the face from his opponent.   This is De Niro at his most hideously unattractive and the actor does nothing to endear his character to us.  His portrayal of La Motta is pure animal savagery, a man who is as habitually violent and thick-skinned outside the ring as he is within it.  Again and again, De Niro fills us with revulsion as his character lashes out, like a sick, deranged animal, at those nearest to him.  As his career takes a catastrophic nose dive, La Motta becomes even more pathetic, a fat old lech who seems to be constantly adrift from humanity.  Only an actor of De Niro's calibre and bravado would have the guts to portray La Motta in such an unremittingly unattractive manner, and only De Niro could succeed in making us feel something for him, as grotesque and shallow as he is.  The actor put on sixty pounds (over a four month period during a break in the filming) to play the older La Motta, almost ruining his own health in the process.  Whilst the film owes almost everything to Robert De Niro's knockout performance, we should not overlook the fine contributions from his talented sparring partners.  Joe Pesci, then a virtual unknown, is superbly well-cast as La Motta's brother, making a strikingly sympathetic contrast with De Niro's driven, almost psychotic character.  Likewise, in one of her earliest and most memorable film roles, Cathy Moriarty serves to emphasise La Motta's darker nature with her arresting portrayal of the boxer's brutalised but resilient young wife.  With such a strong cast, Scorsese could hardly fail to deliver a stunning piece of film drama.

When it was first released in 1980, Raging Bull drew no end of adverse criticism on account of its violent content, although there was a fair number of critics who instantly recognised it for the masterpiece it was.   Perhaps predictably (on account of its bad publicity), the film fared poorly at the box office and earned just over 23 million dollars, only five million more than it cost to make.  In spite of its mixed reviews and lukewarm response from the cinemagoing public, Raging Bull was nominated for eight Oscars in 1981 (including Best Picture and Best Director) but only won awards in two categories, Best Actor (Robert De Niro) and Best Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker).  (That year, the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars went to Ordinary People, Robert Redford's directorial debut feature, and you have to ask yourself: why, oh why, oh why?)

Since its inauspicious first release, Raging Bull has grown considerably in stature and is now widely recognised as one of the great classics of American cinema.  Not only is it the most authentic and compelling film about boxing to date, it is also a powerfully moving study of a man struggling and failing to come to grips with the most destructive aspects of male identity.  A sequel, Raging Bull II, based on Jake La Motte's follow-up autobiography, is currently in production and planned for release in 2013.  The film, which is directed by Martin Guigui and features William Forsythe in the role of La Motta, has drawn fire from MGM, who have filed a lawsuit to prevent its release on the grounds that it presents itself as a sequel to the earlier film and thereby infringes the company's original contract with the former boxer.  It looks as if La Motta will go on fighting right till the end...

Film Synopsis

In 1964, Jake La Motta ekes out a living as a third rate stand-up comedian and raconteur.  Overweight, prematurely aged and physically drained, he is a shadow of the man he once was.   It is hard to believe that, only a decade ago, he was a world famous prize fighter, the man who snatched the world middleweight championship title from Marcel Cerdan in 1949.  Jake's boxing career began to take off in the early 1940s.  The poor kid from the Bronx was soon sparring with the likes of Sugar Ray Robinson and earning big money through his Mafia connections.  But as Jake comes closer to fulfilling his professional ambitions his personal life begins to fall apart.  When he suspects that his wife Vickie has been having an affair with his brother-manager Joey, the boxer is overtaken by a jealous rage.  His marriage only just survives this crisis, but when Jake's career hits the buffers he becomes increasingly estranged from those closest to him.  Shortly after opening a nightclub, he is arrested on a vice charge and ends up in prison.  Despite these setbacks, Jake remains a fighter...