I'm like the donkey with the lamest leg, the largest plough and the harshest farmer when it comes to the chronology in which I should have seen Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull. Scorsese was one of the first directors (along with Stanley Kubrick and David Fincher) that I embraced as a paragon of artful cinema, back in my heady (or just uneventful) days of late high school. I got a huge rush from seeing Taxi Driver and Mean Streets around that time, my burgeoning curiosity for movies intersecting kindly with all of the stark violence, urban unrest and vibrant culture on display. After a while I was on to exploring other things, and Scorsese took a very intermittent role within my moviedom. I saw Gangs of New York junior year in high school, Goodfellas, Casio, and Bringing Out the Dead splashed into my view during a brief stint in college, saw The Departed in theaters a year later, The Aviator came three or so years later, then I finally rounded things off with a viewing of Shutter Island, a full year after it was released.
Raging Bull always seemed to elude my interest. I knew it was considered one of the director's masterpieces - a slogan hacked and coughed and fucked to death by every critic, film student and movie fan in the world. It was one of those things where I was simultaneously curious about the film's true quality, but also extremely put off by the impenetrable armor that so many people had placed upon it. So I dallied, I delayed, I forgot, I remembered and then forgot again. After enough time passed, effectively spreading me away from the film's reputation (in my mind's eye, anyway), I finally beckoned Netflix to send it to me.
Cast in an iron mold of gorgeous black and white cinematography, Raging Bull tells the story (based on actual events) of Jake LaMotta, a maverick boxer barreling down the middleweight regional circuit, undefeated and unchallenged. The man even stands toe to toe with boxing giant, Sugar Ray Robinson, and decimates him on more than one occasion. The film tracks La Motta's sharp rise to near-stardom, then his hard, slow tumble back into obscurity.
When you get down to brass tacks, Raging Bull is fundamentally structured like a million other cautionary biopics of stalwarts that buckle in the face of greatness. The film follows mid-early career LaMotta from his roots in a dysfunctional Bronx apartment where he's managed by his brother Joey, to a heated romance with neighborhood girl, Vicki, rising prestige in the ring, marriage, house, kids, etc, etc. It's not until Jake decides to take a dive in order to garner favor from his neighborhood sponsors that things turn sour, both in the ring and in his personal life.
LaMotta is portrayed by Robert De Niro, who injects a shit-storm of impotent rage and paranoia into a man never quite satisfied with his station in life or the intentions of those around him. It's a performance that helped to cement the legendary reputation (and his subsequent typecasting) of the actor. As far as how it actually plays off within the context of the film? Honestly, there wasn't anything special about De Niro as young to early-middle age LaMotta. Not that De Niro is bad, but it's an identical performance from him, seen many times, both before and after Raging Bull. It's the same mumble-mouth wiseguy cadences and desperate moans that are well-worn in his little corner of pop culture.
When I finally landed upon the "classic" scene of him accusing his brother of cheating with Jake's wife, Jake uttering the gold-plated words, "I heard things" and "you fuck my wife?", it was a let-down of neutral proportions. The scene did it's job in shifting the drama along, but it wasn't nearly as interesting or iconic as all the parodies and stupid fan impressions would have you believe.
I'll give it to De Niro that he does do a fine job as elder Jake LaMotta - fat, washed up, life falling apart - but still desperately dry-humping the limelight, this time in the form of a lizard-haired stand-up comedian. The sense of transformation is truly palpable in the later scenes of the film, particularly where he performs at a shitty dive bar, heckled, scraping the bottom, but retaining a kind of smirking pride for the irony of his life. Of course, even this section of the film is dogged by typical beats of a biopic, particularly when LaMotta's wife drives up to Jake at his club and tells him she's leaving for good with the kids. In the prior scene with Vickie, the couple appears to be at peace in their idyllic Miami home, after an eruption of violence and anger years before, but then suddenly she's leaving him within two subsequent sequences? It feels like a lazy shoehorn, even with the undercurrent of lingering dysfunction.
The romance between LaMotta and Vickie is actually the best framed thing in the movie, at least, for the first section of it. The long, understated shots of the couple getting down to business for the first time and Jake's dominating, self-inflicted tease of her body before a fight are great stones in the river,slowing things to satisfying intimacy, if even for just a little bit.
The two things that struck me as definitively awesome were the boxing sequences and the film's music score. As the camera tracks down to the ring, a shrill set of strings wince off a melancholy that never saps up the film. Instead, it resonates with a graceful sadness. The music sometimes even cascades with the mish-mash of trick photography (not to mention the stellar sound design) that Scorsese employs for Raging Bull's boxing matches. Mixing in slow-motion, fast-motion, bulb-bursts and heavy smoke machines, the fights take on an ethereal quality, detached from the film, floating above it. These sequences are made all the sharper by De Niro's fight choreography, which punctuates and flows quite nicely to the film's dream aesthetic.
Distinctive fight sequences can't save a movie of this caliber, however. Raging Bull has always been billed as a dramatic juggernaut, and a lot of the drama feels like Oscar-blowjob. Mountainous tantrums, tearful breakdowns, a lukewarm brother relationship (that should have been explored further), marginally important supporting female roles and a moral arch that was tired long before this film was made. Sounds like Academy fodder if I've ever seen any. Scorsese injects enough of his trademark non-sequitur moments and the fight photography is absolutely worth watching, but ultimately Raging Bull is tepid. An alright film, with a handful of good ideas scattered throughout.
