Scorsese/De Niro: Raging Bull (Dir. Martin Scorsese, 2h9m, 1980)
Martin Scorsese is lying in a hospital bed in New York. He's been there for nearly two weeks and is lucky to be alive, wracked with internal bleeding, on the verge of dying from a brain haemorrhage, strung out on cocaine, lithium, and painfully underweight. In the room with him, sits Robert De Niro, concerned for the well-being of his collaborator, and undeniably angry at the state he now finds his friend in, berating him with "What’s the matter with you, Marty? Don’t you wanna live to see if your daughter is gonna grow up and get married?" De Niro has an out, an idea to get Martin Scorsese back on his feet and back into film-making. Together, they're going to make a film about the boxer, Jake LaMotta, a controversial figure in and out of the ring, based on-and taking its title from-his biography. The film will do more than rehabilitate Scorsese; it will launch the second half of his career, and go down in history as one of the medium's greatest comebacks, Scorsese arriving out of his corner in the decade that would bring him critical acclaim and financial success-and a healthy amount of controversy. The film's name is Raging Bull.
At the centre of Raging Bull is a question: who is this film about? At surface level, it covers just over twenty years of LaMotta (De Niro's) life; his boxing career, from 1941 to 1954, including his brutal rivalry with Sugar Ray Robinson, and his defence
of his World Middleweight championship, his life after boxing, and his chaotic home life with wife Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) and brother Joey (Joe Pesci). On the surface, Scorsese's themes are clear: via Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin's
script, the film depicts violent, often impulsive, masculinity, only barely held in place by the 'bars' of the ring. Following the film's noirish opening credits, the elagic Intermezzo from Pietro Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" as, wreathed in dry ice, LaMotta shadow-boxes and prepares for the fight that will never come, a visual shorthand for the isolation
and internal battles that rage within, so we are introduced to the older LaMotta preparing for his comedy routine.
De Niro's transformation, the noirish black and wite, the feel of Raging Bull, thanks to Thelma Schoonmaker's razor-sharp editing style, all of these lend themselves perfectly to the sudden jump cut back from 1964 to
1941, and into the ring. It is here that cinematographer Michael Chapman's and Scorsese's decision to put the camera in the ring, often strapped to an actor, marks the film out for its visceral, uncomfortably tight framing, its immaculate choreography, its tight editing, giving the fights a sense of claustrophobia-when
LaMotta punches or gets punched, it's visceral, the camera often knocked off kilter, only occasionally stepping outside of the ring during fights; this first bout in particular lingering upon the barely restrained violence
of the crowd, of chairs thrown, of people trampled. We are trapped in the ring with LaMotta.
Outside the ring, it is his family that is trapped with him. It is this that erupts out of the next scenes, this sense
of LaMotta as barely restrained wildness, his violence and violatile temper permeating the film; LaMotta is a dangerously irational figure, upending a table when his whims are not met, soon
leaving his first wife for Vickie, an underage girl who, much as with his previous wife, Jake LaMotta verbally, emotionally, and physically abuses. LaMotta only seems, like boxing, to understand women through domination and violence.
There is, by the time the film jumps ahead to the 1960s, nothing left in the relationship, LaMotta incapable of interacting with anyone but with violence, despite the picture perfect presentation he strives to for his family
in a later scene. LaMotta's relationships with women are stunted, either by his own inability to relate to anyone by means other than violence, or because his boxing career, his ultimate
goal, precludes it.
His relationships with men, in particular the figure of his brother, are no better; the film is peppered with the violent intimacy of the ring, the rivalry between LaMotta and Sugar Ray Robinson an exhibition of extreme brutality, of violence meted out against each other, and it is this, these explosions of violence, that puncutate the film. Even here, there's an emptiness to LaMotta, focused on the ultimate trophy
of the medium-weight belt, the plaudit for all these beatings and bruising combats, this dark horse, this dark bull with his fans, but seemingly out of reach, the true goal of his ambition stymied by his presence and power
in the ring leaving the true contenders unwilling to fight him. Even in the one place that he should fit in, where his ultra-macho, ultra-masculine violence is proved, when he finally has it, it's empty and hollow, and
tainted by the involvement of the Mafia.
It is with Joey, though, that this masculinity boils to the surface-their first interaction out of the ring is a queasy moment of badinage, of Jake goading his brother into
punching him, the framing locked, this machismo, this sense of anger brewing under the surface, as Joey punches his brother again, and again, until blood spatters his face, until, somewhat sickened by his own actions, Joey
snaps "What are you tryin' to prove? What does it prove?" Joey's own violent impulses-a later scene sees him repeatedly slam a man's head in a car door, whilst, as Jake and Joey's relationship disintegrates,
Vickie attempting to goad her husband into some reaction leads to the brothers' final confrontation before the timeskip, in another beating that does nothing to defuse the tension between them. The film's
coda, in which we see LaMotta attempt to make amends is as awkward as it is pathetic, attempting, time after time, to reconcile, for his brother to show him physical affection, until he eventually relents.
Yet,
it is in his darkest moment, arrested for pimping, that we see the true sense of LaMotta, and who the film is truly about. Banging his head against the wall, De Niro lets forth a wounded soliloquy; the bull is gored by his own horns, the man who has spent his entire life hitting and being hit by other people now persecutes himself, screaming as he beats himself before, tearful, he collapses on the bench in shadow, sobbing that, far from the monster, the
raging bull, that he's played for cheering arenas, and across his personal life, that he's 'not an animal. LaMotta has nothing left; he has failed at being a boxing champion, he has failed at being a husband, he
has failed at being a brother, he
has failed at being a father, he's arguably failed at being a man. A man who knows all too much about failure, about precipitous falls from fame and fortune, stares back through the viewfinder of the camera.
Raging Bull is about two men hitting rock bottom and their battles with masculinity and self-destruction. One is Jake LaMotta, and we leave LaMotta in a nightclub, mulling over Brando's monologue
from On the Waterfront, a parallel he himself never quite understands; the performance would win De Niro his second Academy Award, and the real-life LaMotta would dub his on-screen counterpart
one of the twenty best middle-weight boxers of all time. The other is Martin Scorsese. Raging Bull is not just one of the best films of the 1980s, at a time where New Hollywood crumbled into
nothingness around his peers, not just one of the best films of all time, laurelled with more accolades than I can count, but the film that captures De Niro best, and marries a career best performance to a picture where Scorsese's
themes of brotherhood, violence, and redemption have never been more personal to the director. Raging Bull is nothing less than the film that saved Martin Scorsese.
Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation).
Raging Bull is available via streaming on AppleTV and on DVD and BluRay via Metro Golden Mayer
Next week, we continue into month two of Scorsese/De Niro as
we turn to the black comedy, King of Comedy.
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