Life as a Boxing Match

Rating: 10/10 (25 December 2006)

Robert De Niro, no matter what lesser films he's been in since and how marginal a few of his performances may have been in them, he will never be less of an actor than he is as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. He is authentically disturbing, entirely becoming this awful man, transcending the universe. He does not play anything he does on screen. He is everything he does on screen. He lives and breathes his performance, and you realize that his portrayal runs so deep that it's no longer a performance in the traditional sense. It is haunting in a way that you must see to believe. I have never seen anything like it. There is a scene near the end of the film that makes me cringe reflexively, but all we really see is his silhouette.
The opening shot---the dim, hazy slow-motion shadowboxing of LaMotta's shrouded figure, the tops of the judge's heads barely visible through the shadows of the background, out of which the sporadic flash of a bulb will momentarily disperse---is not even a moment in time so much as a corner sketch of a moment in time, playing on endlessly and savoring itself. And it's a moment of heightened reality in the routine of a boxer: Those moments pumping up ringside before the fight begins. Scorsese manages to present his film with a moment so abstract and yet so pared down that many impressions such as mine can come of it. It's pure feeling.
The character that proceeds to pervade every scene subsequent is not just a crass, angry man with hang-ups. From the moment we see this man's domestic life, the way he treats his miserable wife and loyal brother, we see abominable behavior and not a single redeeming value. It's what generates such a potent undercurrent of unease in his tender, tranquil first scenes with Vicki, his gorgeous 15-year-old future punching bag who is filmed like an unsullied angel and thus seen as one by this brute, who is for the first time we've seen acting polite, friendly and gentle. But when he gradually lures her into sitting on his lap, we see a controlling compulsion in romantic affection's clothing, much like the terrifyingly gentle, placid scene in Cape Fear between Juliette Lewis' coy teenage girl and another manipulative De Niro sociopath. It's the precise sort of tension Scorsese builds throughout his textile of LaMotta's vicious soul, an undercurrent of his true bleak colors beneath the uneasy serenity.
The sudden, random violence that explodes incidentally and in the background of Jake's life is more than just part of a tableau of mean neighborhood streets of the New York Scorsese knows, as with other films in which he similarly uses shocks of realistic violence as a virtual aspect of production design. The shocking riot breaking out in the Cleveland match that opens the film, the brawls and arguments Jake and his brother pass by without reacting, the top-of-the-lungs fight Jake has with his wife ats which no one on the street bats an eye, these are the tableau of Jake's limited, insulated inner world. These are the things that he sees so regularly that his world can't make sense without it.
It's not a story of boxer Jake La Motta's life. It's a story of Jake La Motta's congested aggression and debilitating sexual hang-ups and how they affected his career in the ring. He would fight like he didn't deserve to live. He would punish his opponents like they were the root of his paranoia and anguish, and he would take beatings and punish himself for what he'd done wrong. This is inarguably Scorsese's darkest film. It broods deeply, much quieter and much more claustrophobic than any other film he's made.