A Film of Great and Terrible Beauty

Rating: 10/10 (27 April 2018)

A newcomer's face busted up in a fit of jealous rage. Spectators being trampled by an angry crowd. Our protagonist's face swollen so badly that he can barely even see. These are some of the images Martin Scorsese presents to us in "Raging Bull", and they are beautiful. Beautiful in their starkness and rawness, beautiful in the masterful black-and-white photography of cinematographer Michael Chapman, and beautiful in how they illustrate the depressing tale of Jake LaMotta.
LaMotta (Robert De Niro) is a man of surfaces. After one look at the beauty of teenage Vicky (Cathy Moriarty), he makes the decision of pursuing her and eventually marrying her, leaving his first wife in the process. He becomes violently jealous at the sight of Vicky greeting other men with innocent hugs and kisses. And he himself is all surface. This is a man with no great complexities, no real depth to his character, driven almost purely on the animal instincts of lust and rage. And in this characteristic lies the key to his downfall. LaMotta is so incapable of dealing with these base tendencies that he allows them to destroy him, driving away anyone close to him and causing his life to implode in the process. By the end of the film, he has become a washed-up loser who owns a sports bar in which he delivers his joke of a comedy routine. A pitiful shadow of the raging bull he once was.
Robert De Niro gives one of the most brutally raw performances in modern film history (this is his best, excluding "Taxi Driver"). No matter what scene he's in, he completely transforms into Jake LaMotta, whether it be his viciousness in the ring, his bullying outside of it, or his sleaziness and decadence in his later years. Nobody but De Niro could do such a great job of portraying a man constantly at his boiling point.
He's fully backed up by the supporting cast, mainly Joe Pesci as his brother and manager Joey, and Moriarty as Vicky. Pesci and De Niro have some of the greatest chemistry in film history, and Pesci's work here rivals his Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas. Moriarty is sublime as a woman equal parts victim and schemer who gets drawn into LaMotta's whirlpool of rage at an age where she's too young to know better.
All in all, "Raging Bull", like much of Scorsese's work, is a tragedy about an immoral, violent man whose personal flaws lead to his downfall. It shows the tragedy of a man who had all the potential in the world, but because of his ineptitude in handling his personal life, blasted straight into the gutter and brought everyone else down with him.