Raging Bull
When Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese's biopic of 1940s middle-weight boxing champion Jake LaMotta, premiered in November of 1980, critics and audiences alike hailed it as a masterpiece. The film's expressionistic black-and-white photography, its lyrical realism, and Robert De Niro's stunning performance gave it an expressive power of great magnitude. The amazing physical transformation De Niro underwent in the title role—adding an estimated 60 pounds of fat to his slender frame to portray the older, bloated LaMotta without a fat suit—also made it the most extreme example of method acting thus far in filmmaking. De Niro won an Oscar for his work in Raging Bull, as did editor Thelma Schoonmaker. But many critics, most notably Pauline Kael, film critic for the New Yorker magazine, were uncomfortable with the film, wondering if LaMotta—a violent, troubled wife-abusing lout—was worthy of the spiritual transformation Scorsese attributed to him.
Scorsese undertook the film at a time of crisis in his career. His previous feature, New York, New York, had been a critical and commercial bomb. Scorsese was so demoralized by its failure that he embarked on a debauch of epic length, resulting in his 1978 hospitalization. While visiting Scorsese in the hospital, De Niro, who had lobbied to adapt LaMotta's biography for over four years, once again broached the subject of Raging Bull with his friend and collaborator.
The picture Scorsese envisioned would be a meditation on the Catholic themes that had inspired his best work of the 1970s: redemption, alienation, morality, and guilt. It would be at once a wholly personal work and a revision of the 1940s movies he had loved as a child. It is the tension generated between the formal aspects of the picture—the stylized black-and-white photography, at times documentary-like in execution—and the subject matter that gives Raging
Robert De Niro (left) and Joe Pesci in a scene from the film Raging Bull. its almost hallucinatory ferocity. "What De Niro does in this picture isn't acting, exactly," wrote Pauline Kael, who for the most part took a pejorative view of the film's excesses. "Though it may at some level be awesome, it definitely isn't pleasurable." She was right. In fact, De Niro's portrayal is so harrowing that every moment he is onscreen is excruciatingly tense.
De Niro's LaMotta is a violent, self-centered, egotistical man, a man possessed by uncontrollable paranoia. And like his sobriquet, "The Bronx Bull," LaMotta is bullish. But, as the film begins in medias res, the audience never learns the reasons for LaMotta's obstinate behavior, only that it is his fatal flaw, the chink in his armor. Because of his intransigence in dealing with a local mob boss, he remains a contender for years, unable to gain a shot at the title. But only after acquiescing to mob demands—to throw a fight—does he get his chance at the championship. In his final boxing match—against his old nemesis, Sugar Ray Robinson—LaMotta is virtually crucified on the ropes, taking a brutal beating while refusing to go down. With his face reduced to a bleeding pulp, he taunts the victor, repeating, "You never got me down, Ray," in an infantile chant.
Retired in Florida, LaMotta has become an obese parody of himself, presiding over a Miami nightclub where he introduces the acts with a crass version of suave nightclub patter. Indeed, things fall apart: his long-suffering wife leaves him and he is eventually arrested on a morals charge. In a pivotal scene, he retrieves his championship belt, attacking it with a hammer to dislodge the gems he needs for bail money, mindlessly deforming the belt as he has destroyed his life. Finally, locked in solitary confinement, LaMotta reaches a crisis, attacking his confinement, banging his head against the wall, kicking and punching it in anger and frustration, his body half in shadow and half in light. "Why, you're so stupid, an animal," he screams. Finally he collapses, sobbing, "I wasn't that bad." As he cries, a piece of his sleeve catches a beam of light in the darkened cell. It is one of Scorsese's most transcendent moments, perfectly blending religious metaphor with film language.
The film closes as it had begun, with LaMotta, now a nightclub entertainer, practicing Marlon Brando's "I shoulda been a contender" speech—from On the Waterfront —in front of his dressing-room mirror. He has achieved a measure of peace. Something is now apparent than was not clear in the first scene, where LaMotta appeared a figure of ridicule, butchering Shakespeare with his ludicrous Bronx accent: looking at his face in the mirror, he says, "Let's face it, it was you, it was you."
Scorsese told an interviewer at the time of Raging Bull's release that "those who think it's a boxing picture would be out their minds. Its brutal, sure, but it is a brutality that could take place not only in the boxing ring, but in the bedroom or in an office." Because the film speaks on the level of the specific and the universal notion of man's craving for redemption, its brilliance affects one at a visceral level. As a child, Scorsese had been "taught to hate the sin, but love the sinner." Perhaps no other film so complexly embodies this basic philosophy.
Raging Bull was the culmination of one of several cycles in Scorsese's work, a cycle preoccupied with, in the words of Paul Schrader, "a sense of guilt, redemption by blood, and moral purpose." For Scorsese, filming it seemed to have a salutary effect, resolving the moral conflicts that had permeated Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.
Further Reading:
Beaver, Frank, editor. Twayne's Filmmakers Series: Martin Scorsese. New York, Twayne Publishers, 1992.
Connelly, Marie Katheryn. Martin Scorsese: An Analysis of His Feature Films. Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland, 1991.
Dougan, Andy. Martin Scorsese Close Up: The Making of His Movies. London, Orion, 1997.
Ehrenstein, David. The Scorsese Picture: The Art and Life of Martin Scorsese. New York, Carol Publishing Group, 1992.
Ferrante, Leonard. Redemption in the Narrative: Films of Martin Scorsese. Ann Arbor, UMI Dissertation Services, 1994.
Kael, Pauline. New Yorker. 8 December 1980.
Kellman, Steven, editor. Perspectives on Raging Bull. New York, Perspectives on Film Series, 1994.
Kelly, Mary Pat. Martin Scorsese: A Journey. New York, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991.
Scorsese, Martin. Scorsese on Scorsese. London, Faber, 1989.
Weiss, Marion. Martin Scorsese: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston, G.K. Hall, 1987.
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