"I'm not an animal"

Rating: 9/10 (19 November 2007)

Raging Bull, perhaps Martin Scorsese's first fully mature film, sees him taking on a similar task to that of Orson Welles when he made Citizen Kane  that is, to take a very public figure and strip away the layers of myth, hype and stereotyping to reveal the human being. In this case, Scorsese set himself the great challenge of creating something poignant and lyrical out of the harsh and violent life of a professional boxer.
As with Citizen Kane (and Lawrence of Arabia, and many other great biopics), Scorsese begins his story with the end result  what La Motta eventually became  then resets to the beginning of his career, and eventually coming full circle. It was probably with this picture Scorsese discovered his forte for the biopic or real-life picture. It's not generally acknowledged, but round about half of Scorsese's features after Raging Bull would either be biographies or at least based upon real events and characters. It was this goal of telling an unknown story and revealing the real person that drove these pictures, and it began here with Raging Bull.
As I said, the job was particularly difficult here  it's not easy to create a sympathetic portrait of a paranoid, short-tempered, misogynist brute, but Scorsese appears to have managed it, perhaps more through technique than anything else. First of all, this is Scorsese at his most subjective. There are numerous point-of-view shots, but they are not just there to show what a character is looking at. Scorsese uses his own blend of expressionist techniques  slow motion, blocking out parts of the sound track and emphasising others  to show state of mind. A good example is La Motta's predatory ogling of Vicky the first time he lays eyes on her. Many of these techniques he perfected in Taxi Driver, but equally important in his development up to this point is 1977's New York New York, the most overlooked of Scorsese's pictures. In New York New York Scorsese became more adept with the musical elements of his films  you can see that from opening credits, where he slows down De Niro's aggressive posturing to fit the music until it comes to resemble ballet more than boxing. New York New York gave Scorsese more confidence in telling a story that spans several years, and how to make transitions that convey that passage of time.
Of course the fight scenes are the heart of Raging Bull, and they are real tour-de-forces of technique. Scorsese's policy of keeping the camera in the ring and thus keeping the audience inside the experience of the fight was probably in part influenced by Hitchcock's silent boxing drama The Ring (1928), but I'm also very much reminded of a very different film, The Red Shoes. The Red Shoes, one of Scorsese's favourite films, features an extended ballet sequence in which the camera is inside the performance on the stage, and it is has that similar effect of putting us in the performers shoes. Having said all that, probably the greatest contributor to the Raging Bull fights was editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who coincidentally later married Red Shoes director Michael Powell), since its that editing  not just of the fighters but split second flashes of spectators, cameras and the bell  that has the most impact here. Schoonmaker rightly won an Oscar for her efforts.
As for the actors, well, for my money Robert De Niro is not a great actor, merely a good one. To be honest I think he mostly attracts attention by the lengths he goes to in preparation for a role, learning professional boxing and getting fat on pasta for Raging Bull being perhaps the most extreme example. More interesting here is the discovery of Joe Pesci. He's one of the few really great character actors of modern cinema, and everything a character actor should be. Cathy Moriarty is also very good as Vicky, and it's a mystery to me why she more or less disappeared as a major actor after this.
Raging Bull is an impressive film, one of the later landmarks of the biopic genre, as well being the last word on boxing movies (although sadly they went on making Rocky sequels all the same). It also revitalised Scorsese's career and launched those of several previously unknown actors. It's not the most watchable of Scorsese's pictures but is one of his most significant.