Review: Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

In 1980, Martin Scorsese and his frequent leading man Robert De Niro re-teamed to craft Raging Bull, a film masterpiece that chronicles the career and decline of boxer Jake La Motta, a '50s Middleweight Champion of the World, who was as violent and angry outside the ring as he was inside it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the uncommercial appeal of its subject matter (how can we sympathize with such an unlikable man?) and that at the box office 1980 was owned by The Empire Strikes Back, Raging Bull flopped but its creators still deservedly received vast critical acclaim. This was what saved it from going under, and fortunately it has now become a must-see classic.
Based on La Motta's autobiography Raging Bull: My Story (which De Niro famously brought to Scorsese's attention while the latter was recovering in hospital due to a cocaine addiction), Raging Bull opens in 1964, by which time La Motta was in retirement and trying to make a successful career change as a stand-up comic. Through his younger brother Joey (Joe Pesci), Jake meets Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), a stunning 15-year-old girl who he falls madly in love with and marries. But Jake's extreme volatility comes to the fore many times, eventually destroying his relationships with Vickie and Joey. Also, his uncontrollable appetite is the spark that sets off his decline in strength and thus his decline in successful bouts. By the end he is a broken figure who doesn't know what to do with himself or how to get back what he lost. La Motta may be deeply unlikable, but the film doesn't try to glamourize him or make him a typical Hollywood hero: rather, Marty and Bobby have produced a film showing how a well-known man's soul can be destroyed by his celebrity status and the personal demons he has which he can't overcome.
In De Niro, Pesci and Moriarty we have one of the very finest screen trios ever assembled. It's very hard to know where to begin when describing De Niro's powerhouse performance here. The much-documented enormous weight gain he put himself through to play Jake certainly helped him to the extent that he hoped it would – he's flawless in every scene. Going seamlessly from anger to ferocity in the ring to lust and sexual frustration – often in the space of just one scene – De Niro nails each of Jake's deep complexities, and the end result is a performance that's scary, authoritative and towards the end even very moving (the wall-beating scene is arguably Bobby's finest hour). Not to be outdone, Pesci brings a great deal of heart to the younger, smarter and more self-controlled Joey, and Moriarty gives one of the best female supporting performances of all time as Jake's blonde bombshell trophy wife Vickie. Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader's gritty screenplay gets to the core of these characters brilliantly.
As Marty went into making Raging Bull whilst recovering from a cocaine overdose he was inspired to put his blood, sweat and tears into it in case it was his last movie. And boy, did he. Apart from coaxing those towering performances out of his three main stars, Scorsese summons all the creative talents at his command to create a film of lasting visual wonders as well as emotional power. This is especially evident in the grand boxing sequences, where Michael Chapman's cinematography is so effective you can nearly smell the fighters' sweat and feel the heat and tension inside the ring. Thelma Schoonmaker's editing is so fast but fluid that you can feel every punch that's thrown. With these sequences in particular Scorsese showcases the full artistic force of cinema at its most grand.
Raging Bull was a labor of love for both De Niro and Scorsese, and it shows. They could just as easily have done the opposite and made a boxing movie along the lines of the Rocky series, showing a underdog fighter becoming champion of the world and inspiring the masses. But like true rebels, they did the opposite for a boxing movie – they told the story of a violent man with a desire to be the best who rises to the top but then crashes and burns without really learning anything along the way. Thematically Raging Bull is an eternally tragic and resonant story of how our personal demons can destroy us and also of how society throws celebrities away sometimes within the blink of an eye, and technically it is the stuff that consistently takes your breath away. All in all, a definitive masterpiece. Unforgettable