Raging Bull

Martin Scorsese, USA, 1980, 129 minutes

Widely acclaimed as both the greatest film of the 1980s and of its director, Martin Scorsese, this is one of a select handful of films that everyone should see.

Raging Bull is a biopic of boxer Jake La Motta, whose nickname gives the movie its title. Bookended by sequences of a middle-aged La Motta (Robert De Niro) performing his nightclub routine, we follow the fighter’s path from young contender in 1941 to bloated has-been in 1961.

Though he loses five of his six bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson (often acknowledged as the world's greatest-ever boxer), La Motta's chief adversary over the years is not Robinson, but his own self-destructive nature. La Motta's relationships with others, most notably his wife Vickie (Kathy Moriarty, in her first film performance) and brother/manager Joey (Joe Pesci, in the role which convinced him to continue in an acting career), are governed by a paranoid jealousy and he faces a constant losing battle to keep his weight down.

Raging Bull is one of the most technically accomplished films you will ever see. Scorsese, aided by a brilliant editor (Thelma Schoonmaker) and cinematographer (Michael Chapman), deploys his entire arsenal of cinematic tricks. Yet the film never becomes a mere gallery of effects as Citizen Kane sometimes does. Shooting in black and white (as a means of protesting against the short life expectancy of the then extant colour stock) Scorsese also brilliantly integrates the major realist and formalist tendencies of the 1940s period, with the domestic scenes taking their cue from neo-realism and the boxing ones from noir/expressionism.

Add into the mix the remarkable sado-masochistic performance of Robert De Niro, famously piling on 50lbs to play the older, obese, La Motta, and you have sheer cinematic perfection.

While it's not an easy film to enjoy - pretty much every scene consists of La Motta receiving or dealing abuse - there is no denying Raging Bull's power and accomplishment as a piece of film-making.

Review by Keith H. Brown
Taken from EUFS Programe Autumn 1999

Such were the problems of finance with the onset of the 80s that Scorsese believed this was to be his final film, and consequently pulled out all of the stops. Ostensibly a biopic of boxer Jake La Motta, Raging Bull combines the explosive masculine energy of Mean Streets with themes of emotional inarticulacy and alienation that recall Taxi Driver.

De Niro's La Motta is a man fighting not to survive, but to be punished for what he feels are his own inadequacies. His masochism dominates the ring and the home - while it fuels the rage that has taken him to the top, it also destroys his relationships with both brother/manager Joey (Joe Pesci) and his wife Vickey (Cathy Moriarty).

Shot in expressionistic monochrome by Michael Chapman, Raging Bull boasts the most visceral fights ever put on film. As always with Scorsese, however, the spectacular camerawork is inextricably linked to the emotional thrust of the story. And the violence is never more palpable than when De Niro and camera are at rest in a domestic setting - we feel the pent-up fury in Jake as he struggles to come to terms with himself.

Review by Andrew Abbott
Taken from EUFS Programme 1993-94

Raging Bull begins and ends with Jake La Motta in New York in 1964 rehearsing his stand up routine in front of a dressing room mirror. "Give me a stage where this bull here can rage. And although I can fight, I'd much rather recite..."

In the 40s Jake La Motta's stage was the boxing ring where he eventually became middleweight champion in 1949 by beating Marcel Cerdan, but his nemesis was "Sugar" Ray Robinson whom he faced six times and lost five. La Motta felt an enormous amount of guilt and inadequacy and his boxing style was to overcome simply by absorbing as much punishment as his opponent could dish out. This sense of unworthiness spread outside the ring, manifesting itself in paranoid jealousy and violence. After retiring from the ring, La Motta became a stand up comic (not a very good one) and failed businessman,

In a certain contender for most violent movie ever (though there's no murders, no rape), Scorsese presents simple chronological units of Jake's life, with little attempt to put a psychological or narrative framework around them. We see the contrasts of the anti-realism of the fight sequences, including the last one with "Sugar" Ray Robinson which La Motta loses but refuses to lose because he refuses to go down; and the domestic scenes where Jake's tensions simmer beneath the surface occasionally emerging, as when he accuses his brother/manager Joey (Joe Pesci) of having an affair with his wife Vicky (Cathy Moriarty), breaks into his home and assaults him just as Joey is correcting his kid's table manners by threatening him with a knife.

Although it spans the same years as New York, New York, Raging Bull couldn't be more different in style. Michael Chapman's sharp black-and-white photography reflects Weegee's photojournalism (though ostensibly it was chosen because colour film at the time was subject to rapid fading). Thelma Schoonmaker's brisk editing won her an Oscar. But Raging Bull will probably be best remembered for Robert De Niro's piling on the pounds to play the older, fatter Jake.

Review by Stephen Cox
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96