Gruesomely effective tale of self destruction

Rating: Null/10 (21 June 2003)

Scorsese directs, De Niro stars and Pesci supplies the hundred mile per hour dialogue. It's stylish, it's fast(despite it's running time), the high contrast black and white photography is both haunting and brutal, the acting is sometimes breathtakingly good and the use of a diverse score is inspired.
Jake La Motta, the boxing 'bull' of the title, comes vividly to life on the screen in the person of De Niro. He's not a sympathetic character and neither the director nor De Niro pull any punches in telling us as much. This is a hard bitten, gritty movie with so much going for it and so much that works with no apparent effort.
If there are flaws,they are few, maybe the sometimes over contrast-laden photography (which evokes the French new-wave style of the 60s)? That does get a little hard to watch on ocassion. Maybe the over-brutal and in fact over-exciting boxing scenes. We all know that middleweights do not throw so many rapid-fire punches round after round after round - they tend to hang to each other rather a lot after a few rounds and duck a lot of what's thrown at them. Here, La Motta, Suger Ray and the like all punch like rivetting guns and never miss, never duck and seldom take a breather. It's fantasy boxing, however well shot and however impressive it looks. It's like auto racing footage that used to be shown speeded up in Hollywood movies of yore. It always looks fake. Other than that, and the fact this is a grim tale with few redeeming moments of levity, it's a masterpiece in movie making. De Niro was surely seldom better and Pesci is like a firework display in full cry. Two scenes stand out above all others. One is the wonderful title sequence of the hooded La Motta warming up in the ring, in slow motion to a most beautiful piece of music (I can never remember it's title but it's heartbreakingly good!) with the background shrouded in smoke and floodlighting.Poetry. The other is a long single shot taking La Motta from the dressing room out through the corridors, into the auditorium and up into the ring with the quiet and reflection of back-stage suddenly errupting into a mad frenzy of cheering and popping flash guns. Terrific.
All in all it's a hard film to actually enjoy but it's one that deserves all of it's endless admiration.