Why Raging Bull is the greatest film ever made

Rating: 10/10 (19 November 2006)

Of course this isn't a realistic statement to make, but this film is beyond the best film of the eighties, and indeed I think it tops all the most frequently mentioned top American Films, most notably Citizen Kane, The Searchers, and Scorsese' own Taxi Driver. Indeed the closest thing you can compare it to is Bergman's persona. This film is not only a powerful and impossibly well crafted story, it is a stylistic breakthrough for a cinematic artist who had already taken international cinema by storm. Indeed, here we see emerge the fully mature Scorsese, who couldn't have gone on to make Goodfellas or the Departed without making this film first. While he always had a mastery of subjective photography and slow motion, in Raging Bull his camera is so fluid, so reluctant to stop moving, that you can almost hear Max Olphus weeping for its freedom.
One reason Citizen Kane is so amazing is the performance of Wells, who at the age of 25 plays a man who ages from twenty-five years old to an elderly man. Wells as a director used make-up to produce his effect, but Scorsese had a method actor whose commitment to this part led him to stop production for weeks in order for him to put on enough weight to play an aging, fat LaMatta. This effect is rendered in sharp contrast immediately, in the first cut of the film, from 1964 to 1941, where LaMatta is in peak physical condition, as is De Niro, who for these early fight scenes is perfectly chiseled.
What Kane did in 1941 was give us a model for the potential of the talkie. What Raging Bull did in 1980 was give filmmakers a new vocabulary for personal film-making. This is not your old school Hollywood drama, like Ordinary People, which beat Raging Bull for the best picture Oscar that year. This is a film that gets into the head of its subject. It manages to present the thoughts, feelings, and actions, of an incredibly complex and insecure character, in a way that lets the audience maintain their own sense of morality and outrage, yet makes the subject more empathetic and consequential. Where most biography films highlight the subjects achievements and gloss over or erase the improprieties and ugly marks, Raging Bull revels in them.
Pesci gives a performance that no other actor in history could have gotten right. It's possible to envision this film with someone else playing LaMatta (a young Brando comes to mind), but not Joey. No one could deliver these lines with such conviction and emotional significance. For instance, when Jake asks Joey if he slept with Jake's wife, Joey responds, "I'm not gonna answer the question. It's a sick question, you're a sick f***, and I'm not sick enough that I'm going to answer it." What Pesci does with this material is nothing short of remarkable. He is so familiar with his brother's behavior at this point, he is fed up with it, yet he knows he has to select his responses very carefully, or he will only make matters worse. And underneath this is still concern for his brother, to whom he stays loyal despite endless reasons to throw in the towel.
This story is presented in an unflinching and entirely naturalistic manner, except for the fight scenes, which abandon any sense of naturalism to produce a surrealistic and completely animal portrayal of combat. The soundtrack is very dense, containing animal noises, lion roars, bird shrieks, screaming audience members, and shattering panes of glass evoked by the bright flash bulbs of the ring side photographers. The camera stays in the ring, like a third fighter, weaving in and out of the fight. Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoomacher use sophisticated matches on action to produce chaotic movement. One virtuoso shot, perhaps one of the best ever put on film, shows LaMatta breaking away from Sugar Ray Robinson, he backs away from the fight, the shot is consumed by slow motion, a heightening awareness, and then, back to normal speed and the fight resumes.
This is a rare film because all the different elements of its production, the writing, acting, photography..etc, fit perfectly together as if they were meant to be as they are. But what puts this film above almost any other ever made, is that it is a beautiful and moving expression of an artistic soul in great turmoil. Scorsese had just endured a complete collapse due to his drug use. This was the first film he made after he recovered, and he has said that at the time he thought it would be the last film he would ever make. So he chose a film that expressed his love and obsession for the cinema as well as one that expressed his great anger, his pride in his heritage, his commentary on the contradictions of the men of the generation before his, and most importantly, where he wanted to go. There is some of this film in every film he's made since, and in some sense he's been remaking the film over and over again. And it ends where it started, with an old, washed up Jake. But at the end, we realize we've never seen him happier. He had achieved, after everything, some strange form of enlightenment. Maybe Scorsese wasn't there when he made the film, but it's where he wanted to end up.