Raging Bull tells the story of a great boxer and marginally despicable human being: Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro). Filmed in a gritty, naturalistic style in luminescent black and white, Martin Scorsese’s tortuous film is a fascinating exploration of a diseased man’s soul.
Considerable attention has been paid to the movie’s fight scenes of operatic amplitude, as Scorsese emphasises the brutality through ingenious audio-visual techniques. The scenes are awash in an orgy of sensual impressions, from the incessantly flashing cameras to the sonic boom of punches landed. Slow motion depicts boxers winding up their fury like a watch, then rendering their uncoiled ferment in action that is sped up ever-so-slightly to accentuate the fighters’ transformation into beasts. Scorsese even enters the ears of the pugilists, where their single-mindedness transforms the aural circus around them into a world strangely muffled, as if wrapped in cotton batting.
DeNiro is riveting as LaMotta, both a shallow and complex man. He is a man of his appetites, constantly referred to as an animal, who uses the world as his punching bag. Most often, those at the receiving end are his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) and wife Vicky (Cathy Moriarty) who both deliver remarkable film debuts.
In LaMotta’s world, private battles explode into public violence, as he salves his wounds by inflicting pain on others. However, he is also the man whose remorse leads him to use his fights as penance, wherein he allows opponents to batter him from corner to corner in the hope he will gain absolution for pain he has inflicted on those he loves.
While LaMotta lacks the depth to be a figure of truly great tragedy, his story does have a rough-hewn tragic arc. After achieving his dream of becoming middleweight champion only to see his world crumble under the strain of his paranoid insecurities and jealousies, in the end Jake is alone.
Staring at himself in the mirror, LaMotta acts out the most famous scene from another great boxer-mobster movie, On the Waterfront. The parallels between the movies are numerous, but the most obvious difference is played out here. Whereas Brando’s character Terry blames his brother for how he has failed, "It was you, Charlie," LaMotta delivers this same line looking straight at himself in the mirror. The concluding allusion to the Biblical passage, "once I was blind, now I can see," completes Jake’s journey out of the darkness.
Filmed in a gritty, naturalistic style in luminescent black and white, Martin Scorsese’s tortuous film is a fascinating exploration of a diseased man’s soul.- Dan Jardine
