Raging Bull is about a man with an iron skull and no brains inside, an enduring but mysteriously wretched man who can't trust anyone or enjoy himself and who finally destroys all his relationships through jealousy, paranoia, and fear. [Jake La Motta's] smile says that he's crazy and that his inhuman strength comes out of the craziness. Just as in the sentimental and melodramatic fight movies of the forties, to which this movie is a sour rejoinder, Jake is a Bronx slum boy, and the mob wants a piece of him. Only this time there's no upbeat ending: Jake may break free of the mob, but he can't break free of himself.
Directed by Martin Scorsese … and written by Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader, Raging Bull is a kind of morose American passion play, a chronicle of the successive stages of a fighter's disintegration. Starting in 1941, when Jake was a fierce young contender, punching in rapid volleys out of a closed-in crouch, the movie passes, in brief, violent scenes, through the great six-match rivalry with Sugar Ray Robinson, the 1948 title fight against Marcel Cerdan, and the loss of the title to Robinson. It ends with a long, pathetic coda devoted to Jake's miserable time as a nightclub owner in Miami and as a lewd comedian—a fourth-rate Joe E. Lewis—introducing strippers in cruddy bars. Along with the fights, we see the volatile neighborhood life and urban hellishness … and also Jake's hapless efforts as husband and brother. Even when he holds the title, Jake never feels like a champ—there he is in his tacky Pelham Parkway apartment, with its broken TV and its figurine lamps, hassling his wife over nothing. It's a pitiless, unrelenting, terribly sad movie. The aging Jake, corpulent and heavy-jowled in a way that suggests a corresponding coarsening of the spirit …, is a piteous and terrifying figure: Isn't this what we all fear—that we might simply get older and thicker, learning nothing at all?
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