Relentless and vivid and touching

Rating: 9/10 (19 December 2009)

Raging Bull (1980)
A serious, black and white look at the complicated truth of Italian American middleweight boxer, Jake La Motta. It's a boxing movie, for sure, and the boxing scenes are riveting and offputting in their violence, but it's purposeful violence, and part of the bigger picture.
The real story is the rise and fall, if you can call it that, of a man. He happened to have a gift for boxing, but it could be anyone with talent who faces a corrupt world and once, just once, weakens. There are other stories that have parallels to this, certainly, from Body and Soul (1947) to Rocky (1976). And of course The Wrestler (2008) has a different sport but same fall from glory. All of these films are excellent in their own ways, and Raging Bull keeps up with the best of them. Certainly Robert De Niro, as La Motta, is astonishing in his range, covering a couple decades and gaining some serious weight toward the end, and Joe Pesci backs him up beautifully.
The filming in any Martin Scorsese movie is significant, and director of photography Michael Chapman keeps the dramatic light and clean use of focus (and lack of focus) in great balance. The sound is complex and interesting (both with added sounds and intrinsic ones). But most of all the story itself, with a vivid believability, is what grips you. I'm not really comfortable with boxing (I guess people can do what they want in that regard), and so a movie about boxing that gets as rough as this one does has me cringing sometimes, even more than with most Tarantino hyper-violence. But that's part of the point. A relentless, engrossing work.