Raging Bull
Before the ignoble advancement of corrupt promoters and the lack of having any more big star names (can anyone even name the HEAVYWEIGHT Champion Of The World right now? Anyone?), the sport of boxing was truly the sport of kings, the original one on one combat sport going back over 100 years in history with the biggest names from even that far back still being preserved in the annals of history today. When it comes to the era of The 1940s, few names in the sport were bigger than Jake LaMotta, “The Bronx Bull” who decimated the middleweight division all through that decade and had what remains one of the most legendary of rivalries with one Sugar Ray Robinson (widely considered pound for pound to be the best ever), even handing Robinson the first ever loss of his career en route to winning the World Middleweight Championship from Marcel Cerdan before finally dropping it to the great Sugar Ray. Later in life, LaMotta took on an acting career and also wrote a book about his life out of the ring in contrast to the success in his career. That book was obtained by Robert DeNiro, who brought it to Martin Scorsese and convinced him to make this movie in 1980, one which (despite losing the Best Picture Oscar that year to Ordinary People) remained in the pantheon of untouchable cinema classics for years and years but has recently undergone a reevaluation due mostly to the unspeakably brutish nature of its lead character who was even described by one studio executive (and rightfully so) as being a “cockroach” when he was wondering aloud why this kind of movie should even be made. It certainly has merit as a biopic and as a sports movie depicting the life of the famous athlete in question, and very little if anything negative can be said about the acting: DeNiro in his Best Actor Oscar winning performance got so into the concept of playing a boxer that he underwent intense training (from LaMotta himself) and even fought in three actual professional fights in real life, winning two out of three. Then when depicting LaMotta in his later years, production shut down so that DeNiro could legitimately put on 60 pounds (with his face noticeably fattening out), certainly a disturbing effect but one that speaks volumes about his dedication. As said, the movie’s strengths are in the acting (and the various chemistries amongst those actors), and its depictions of the ups and downs of a real life athlete’s career in his chosen sport. Where the film has lost its sway with many viewers (and caused its overall all time stock to drop quite a bit) is in showing its main character dealing abusively with his own family (most notably with his wives) and showing himself to be both intensely paranoid as well as being a pathological sociopath, which some argue is the result of intense self loathing and maybe even having a touch of bipolar disorder before many people even knew what that was (reportedly after seeing the film a remorseful LaMotta asked his real life ex wife Vickie if he was really that bad, only for her to tell him that he was even worse). The film starts with DeNiro’s LaMotta well into the throes of his boxing career, still living in his old neighborhood but walking around nonetheless a respected man, even if many still regard him as being a misanthrope based on his reputation. The only person he really trusts is his brother and manager Joey (Joe Pesci, bursting out of nowhere onto the acting scene to play the film’s most likable and symphathetic character and picking up a Supporting Actor Oscar nom for his efforts) but really he seems to have a distaste for everyone around him, in particular the local mafia hoods (led by Nicholas Colasanto and Frank “Billy Batts” Vincent) who seem to own the neighborhood and think that they’re tough guys even as Jake knows that when you take away their guns they wouldn’t look so tough when dealing with him. Turns out that he is drawn to a teenage blonde that hangs out with them a lot (and may even possibly be a high end prostitute whom they are pimping out), so when he claims her as his own, little resistance is given (what with his legit celebrity status and all) and he marries her, but that’s really where the trouble begins. Cathy Moriarty as Vickie LaMotta was also a casting choice of an actress coming out of nowhere, but the 18 year old (who nabbed a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nom) holds her own masterfully with DeNiro as the woman who can tame the bull but only if she can put up long enough with his psychotic, obsessive behavior. Granted, her full culpability as being a world class cheater is admittedly made very ambiguous (since much of the story is told from LaMotta’s point of view) and it IS implied that LaMotta has “heard things” from people about what she does behind his back (although he is never shown being told or actually overhearing anything) and even Pesci’s Joey tells him point blank to just drop her so that he can stop driving himself crazy over this and focus on his fights (which in itself implies that maybe even Joey knows “things” that are best kept from Jake for his own good). But whether his paranoia about what she’s doing behind his back at any given time is the result of the neighborhood rumor mill or his own punch drunk addled mind it’s when he snaps and becomes violent in the domestic arena (including a right cross to Vickie that’s the cleanest shot he lands in the whole movie) that we learn to hate this main character (and to be honest, Vickie IS good enough to stay with him for a much longer time than she should) so that even after his boxing days are behind him (and we see DeNiro with that 60 extra lbs worth of layered fat) and he owns a nightclub where he spends much of his time on the microphone telling jokes which nobody finds funny that we get to see just how pathetic he really is, even as he still is one of the greatest sports legends of the 20th century. And that is basically Scorsese’s main hook here (who would really care about a fictional character that acts like this?) with the contrast and contradiction being shown about a man considered “great” by many but who is still a trainwreck of a human being. A guy whom in his later years thinks of himself as being witty and charming but is really neither (although he remains very boorish) and then hits his lowest point when he laughily serves alcohol to and then kisses a 14 year old girl (with the more hazy implication given that he also might have promoted her into prostitution) for which he gets busted by Miami’s vice squad and does a little time for it and then that’s where we get the big play for sympathy from Scorsese and DeNiro when LaMotta angrily bangs his head against and punches a concrete wall while sobbing and admittedly we as viewers still feel nothing for him (after all, he wasn’t sobbing when he victimized that child) as the characters we had come to actually care for were really the ones who had escaped him and his wrath such as Vickie and Pesci’s Joey (who does take his own brutal beating). On the purest level of acting it can be said that DeNiro and the others are peerless but as far as reading into any kind of a message here except being on a purely cautionary level then it just falls a little bit flat, as DeNiro’s best turns still remain his psychotic loner in Taxi Driver, his pure evil ex con rapist masquerading as a Bible Thumper in Cape Fear, and his slick bank robber who leaves nothing to chance in Heat (and Pesci was much more mesmerizing with his loose cannon roles in both Goodfellas and Casino). Scorsese (denied Best Director that year in a controversial loss to Robert Redford) does do a fine stylistic job in presenting the story, with the boxing matches themselves being a thing of beauty. And even today, Jake LaMotta himself still endures at 95 years of age, his name immortalized in the annals of combat sports but his actual life itself is set down pretty solidly here, with him always having known for over 35 years now that the whole world realizes what kind of a man that he was in his prime and thus we hope that he has devoted himself to living a more positive life after his soul was laid bare for everybody to see with his own eyes having been opened by how Scorsese and DeNiro presented us with his story…
8/10