 |
| Images courtesy of MGM/UA |
Following the commercial failure of his 1977 musical period
drama New York, New York starring his favorite player Robert De Niro and
compounded with his own struggles with cocaine addiction, director Martin
Scorsese landed hospitalized in rehab.
Before, during and after his recovery, Robert De Niro repeatedly
approached Scorsese with disgraced boxer Jake La Motta’s autobiography Raging
Bull: My Story (co-authored by Joseph Carter and Peter Savage) with the
idea of making his life story into a film.
Though the director repeatedly turned it down, after screenwriter Mardik
Martin adapted the screenplay with the help of Paul Schrader, Scorsese began to
rethink the project and its protagonist as emblematic of his own personal
redemption arc. If Jake La Motta could
be knocked off of his feet with no one to blame but himself for his fall and
find the will to stand back up to carry on, so could Scorsese.
With a conscious choice to film in black-and-white courtesy
of Taxi Driver cinematographer Michael Chapman to separate itself from
co-producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff’s own affiliation with the Rocky
films while lending timelessness to the proceedings, Scorsese felt
post-rehab this would be his last project in America. Despite an initial lukewarm critical and
commercial release, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull may well be the auteur’s
finest and most personal expression to date in its compelling, nonjudgmental
regard for a troubled and eventually broken man’s journey towards rock bottom
and out through Hell back among the living again. The polar-opposite of John G. Avildsen and
Sylvester Stallone’s Oscar winning rags-to-riches underdog story, Raging
Bull is less interested in his career ascent and descent than in probing
the damaged, jealous and viciously enraged psyche of its hero.
Starting in the Bronx 1964 we meet an obese aged Jake La
Motta (Robert De Niro having gained 60 pounds for the role) about to do another
live stand-up theater show. A man who
has clearly fallen hard after years of abuse both within and outside of the
boxing ring to himself and sometimes others, the film poses the question how he
landed here in this state. In a jump-cut
thanks to Scorsese editing legend Thelma Schoonmaker that will be as studied as
the bone coming down as a satellite in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we flash
backwards to La Motta circa 1941 in a particularly violent boxing match against
Jimmy Reeves with his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) cheering him on in the
corner. Fending off mob offers from
Salvy Batts (Scorsese regular Frank Vincent) for shots for the middleweight
title amid a deteriorating and domineering marriage, La Motta sets his sights
on underage fifteen-year-old blonde teenager Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) whom he
soon woos and years later marries.
Over the course of the film tracking La Motta’s rise to
prominence while getting mixed up in illicit mob deals, Raging Bull largely
becomes about La Motta’s burning jealousies over Vickie threatening to spiral
out of control into violent confrontation.
Much like De Niro’s saxophonist in Scorsese’s previous film only far
more extreme in his capacity for brutality and his own deeply buried
self-loathing, La Motta lashes out in fits of rage sometimes talking himself
into justification for attacking someone else especially loved ones. Not wholly unlike the contradictory neuroses
floating around Travis Bickle’s head in Taxi Driver that negate any
hopes for change or growth, La Motta in Raging Bull seeks out his
penance on the receiving end of a clenched fist whether asking his brother to
smash his face or letting Sugar Ray Robinson pummel him into oblivion but
defiantly still standing upright to infamously inform his opponent ‘You never
got me down’.
Before the extraordinarily choreographed fights even begin
we are presented with La Motta in slow motion skirting about the ring throwing shadowboxing
punches as the boldly red title card Raging Bull plays against the
black-and-white footage. In addition to
being a subtle nod to his mentor and hero Michael Powell, the red title seems
to suggest even in muted colorlessness you will still feel the crimson red blood
of these hand-to-hand boxing sports matches.
Following the credits we glimpse La Motta at the end of his rope,
overweight and doing whatever measly gigs he can find to keep going as he
rehearses with a giant cigar before a mirror.
Already given both ends of the spectrum of this man’s meteoric rise and
fall, we’re well prepared to sit through the journey chronicling how and why
Jake La Motta ended up where he is.
An unblinking portrait of male hysteria and self-loathing
coming out in the forms of insatiable anger and aggression needing to take it
out on others before turning the bloodied callused fist back on himself, Raging
Bull while set in the boxing world with mob affiliations is primarily a
nonjudgmental character study mining for some dogged measure of redemption in
the absolute worst of man. Begging the
question why anyone would want to make a film out of this frankly disturbed and
abusive man’s life as it stares unblinkingly into his domination and
increasingly violent physical and psychological abuse of his wife Vickie and
even his brother Joey, Raging Bull doesn’t seek to shock or provoke so
much as it tries to peel away the layers of this character’s makeup like an
orange clinically. Underneath all that
shielding brawn and boorish masculinity is a fragile, deeply damaged human
being who has sinned greatly but still has some room for atonement in the life
he has left to live.
A tour de force of filmmaking from top to bottom with
brilliant sound design by Frank Warner who reportedly threw glass panes on
concrete to create the sounds of flash bulbs flying out of cameras, a
powerhouse of acting from all three of its principal performers with Joe Pesci
and Cathy Moriarty being relative newcomers at the time, Raging Bull received
eight Academy Award nominations including two wins for Best Actor Robert De
Niro and Best Editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
Though the film’s level of violence and confused promotional rollout
didn’t pull more than $23 million against its $18 million budget, the film has
since gone on in home video sales and rentals to amass somewhere around $72
million in adjusted grosses. At this
stage, canonized by the Criterion Collection, it is unquestionably a modern
classic.
At the time Scorsese was worried following New York, New
York and this that he’d have trouble financing future projects. Despite this, Scorsese has since gone on to
have a massively successful film directing career with many pointing to Raging
Bull as mutually Scorsese and De Niro’s finest creative hour. A trained, incisive portrait of a human
ticking time bomb ready to explode in the boxing ring only to largely detonate
on loved ones at home, Scorsese’s decades-spanning epic is perhaps the most
impassioned and heartfelt expression of displaced anger, mental illness and
above all distinctly human weakness ever put upon the silver screen.
--Andrew Kotwicki
