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Raging Bull

US (1980): Biography/Sports

Rated R, Black & White, 128 minutes

Raging Bull is a study in violence, part of director Martin Scorsese's continuing vision of a moral underworld, which began with Mean Streets (1973) and went on to the ultraviolent Taxi Driver (1976). In a riveting performance, versatile actor Robert De Niro portrays the brutish, plug-ugly boxer Jake La Motta.

Synopsis

Up-and-coming boxer. De Niro is shown as an up-and-coming boxer in 1941, trim and full of ambition, beginning his climb to the middleweight championship. He doesn't just win his bouts, he beats his opponents bloody, consumed by a violent need to destroy them.

In his personal life La Motta's morals are questionable as well. Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) attracts the boxer's lustful eye while she is still a teenager, and though married, La Motta dates the ice-cold blonde. He sleeps with her in his parents' home and, after discarding his first wife, marries her.

Mafia takes control. Joe Pesci, playing La Motta's brother and manager Joey, serves as a daffy philosophical adviser and marital consultant. He is just as violent as La Motta, attacking a bunch of goons in a nightclub when he discovers one of the Mafia leaders trying to bed Vickie. Joey breaks his arm, but later makes a truce with the gangster and opens the door inadvertently to a relationship with the Mafia, which seeks to control La Motta's career for gambling interests.

Eventually the Mafia does control La Motta's matches and compels him to take a dive in one fight, an event that taints his otherwise clean reputation. So obviously is the fight thrown that La Motta is almost kicked out of boxing, but he redeems himself in several hard battles and finally wins the championship. (La Motta defeated French boxer Marcel Cerdan; however, Sugar Ray Robinson —played here by Johnny Barnes— would go on to become the nemesis of La Motta's career, finally wresting the title from him and beating La Motta five out of six times during his career.)

Title and family lost. While still on top, La Motta loses all control and discipline, refusing to train (De Niro gained 50 pounds to portray the out-of-shape La Motta), and becoming insanely jealous of his voluptuous wife, believing she is sleeping with Mafia gangsters and even with his own brother. Screaming that Joey has slept with his wife, La Motta pounds him to a pulp in front of his family. La Motta inevitably alienates his wife and, after losing the title, loses her too.

Though jealous of his wife's supposed infidelity, La Motta himself has been sleeping with the young girls who hang around his seedy nightclub—where he fancies himself a stand-up comedian and stage-floor philosopher. He is briefly jailed for serving liquor to underage girls and later makes a nightclub "comeback" by appearing at a New York hotel lounge. But his dissolution is complete. The film ends as he saunters onto a nightclub stage to brag about his disastrous life.

Critique

Brilliantly realistic. Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader spare no one in this drama of failure. (La Motta reportedly did not like the film; he believed—and rightfully so—that it showed him as a wild beast.) The fight sequences are brilliantly realistic, all seen from La Motta's point of view, many shot in slow motion, which intensifies the images of the brutality and the bloodletting. The dialog richly captures the crude, brusque, often humorous world of pro fighting, with all its corruption.

Tightly focused. Technically, Scorsese's direction is flawless, and this film, more than any of his other works, places him among the top filmmakers of his time. The story is tightly focused around La Motta's ring experience, and Scorsese often borrows from earlier, classic boxing films, such as Champion (1949); Body and Soul (1947); The Harder They Fall (1956); The Set-Up (1949); and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956).

By shooting in black and white, Scorsese captures both the bleak reality of the fight scene and a visual feel of the 1940s—while implicitly referring also to the masterful black-and-white films of an earlier time. The film also is liberally sprinkled with images of Catholicism—crucifixes, holy pictures—obliquely contrasting the icons of spirituality with the cult of violence that marked the fighter's career.

A dark masterpiece. But it is De Niro's performance, a virtuoso portrait played with extraordinary energy, that makes Raging Bull a masterpiece—a dark one, to be sure. The other performances are, for the most part, very capable. Pesci is genuinely funny with his fractured philosophies of life. Moriarty, however, playing the much-abused wife, is a little wooden. Everyone else is appropriately oily and distasteful.

Awards. Both De Niro and editor Thelma Schoonmaker took Oscars for their work in Raging Bull. Other nominations included Best Picture (won by Ordinary People), Best Supporting Actor (Pesci), Best Supporting Actress (Moriarty), Best Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Sound.

Questions for Discussion:

1. Which of the various critical approaches to interpreting film catalogued by Boggs (formal/technical, auteurist, feminist, psychological, genre, etc.) seems most useful in understanding Raging Bull, and what meaning(s) does it yield?
2. What does the film suggest about boxing, the boxing commission, the mob, and Jake La Motta during the '40s and '50s?
3. David Bordwell writes that most viewers take "an either/or view" of Raging Bull. Do you think that the film celebrates Jake's "murderous rage," or "condemns Jake as a pathological case"?  Or something else entirely? Support your claim with evidence from the film.
4. How is the perspective on violence suggested by Raging Bull similar to, or different from, that of Kubrick's in A Clockwork Orange?  Do these films asks us to identify with the protagonist?  Do the films ask us to appreciate the causes of the violence?  Do they condemn--or condone--the brutality we witness (or do they make some other statement about its causes, effects, or implications)?
5. We've studied the art of adaptation closely.  While we've watched one "fact-based" film (On the Waterfront) that changes names, places, and dates and creates characters in order to create a dramatic story, Raging Bull treats the facts of La Motta's life altogether differently, and in a brutal way.  Based on your reading of the excerpt from La Motta's autobiography, what did Scorsese (and scriptwriter Paul Schrader) take into account when adapting the story?   How faithful to the facts is their account?  What risks exist in their approach?  What rewards?
6. What are the effects of framing the story around a series of flashbacks?  Are those effects specific to this story or universal to all "flashback" narrative structures (e.g., Cinema Paradiso or Letter from an Unknown Woman)?
7. What specific techniques does Scorsese use to heighten the subjectivity of the fight scenes?  What are some of the effects of those techniques?
8. What are the stylistic and thematic effects of the black-and-white cinematography in Raging Bull?  (Take into account that the film was made in 1980.)

Acknowledgments

Cassiey Biever, Jamie Bawek, Mark Fjosne, and Angela Saless (H140 S'99) contributed discussion questions, ideas, and materials to this page.