Self-redemption

Rating: 9/10 (26 April 2015)

"I wanted to push all the way to the very very end and see if I could die. Embracing a way of life to its limit."
Martin Scorsese
During the making of New York, New York (1977), which turned out to be a box-office failure, the Roman Catholic director, Martin Scorsese, sank into a spiraling abyss of drug addiction. While he was "embracing a way of life to its limit", he almost got himself killed after having some "bad coke" that caused a massive internal bleeding. Thanks to this wake-up call, he finally kicked off his cocaine addiction with the help of the actor and his close friend, Robert De Niro, with whom he collaborated on all his most notable works. Believing that he would never make another film, Scorsese poured all his energy into making the next film, Raging Bull (1980), which received spectacular success and was voted the greatest film of the 1980s by Britain's Sight & Sound magazine.
Raging Bull is a biographic drama film about an emotionally self-destructive boxer fueled by paranoid jealousy and rage, which lead him to the top of the ring while destroy his life outside of it. The film is not only a redemption, which saved Scorsese from his self-destruction but also a landmark where his film style reached its peak: the expressionistic depict of psychological points of view. In his previous hits, Mean Street (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), Scorsese rendered the protagonists' psychotic perspectives using high contrasts and aggressive use of bold colors. Raging Bull, shot in high contrast black-and-white, vividly carried out the raging, masochistic and insecure mind state of Jake La Motta through the perfect combination of visual and audio effects. From La Motta's point of view, his wife, Vickie is always in slow motion when she is close to other men. Through the exaggerated depiction of an innocent event, La Motta's jealousy is visually represented. During the most riveting boxing scenes, Scorsese utilizes not only the punching sounds but also the bull roars, flashbulbs, water-running, and even squelching watermelon sound effects to externalize the bubbling rage deep within La Motta.
Brutal and intense as the movie is, it has a poetic and contemplative opening of La Motta shadowboxing alone in the ring. The background music "Intermezzo" from the opera Cavalleria Rusticana orchestrates a tragedy that is about to unfold, while La Motta's movements are full of freedom and even transcendence. Interestingly, the movie also ends with La Motta, now an old, fat and failed comedian, shadowboxing in the dressing room before his show. Perhaps Scorsese is trying to suggest that throughout La Motta's whole life, boxing is the physical way in which this self-destructive soul seeks for spiritual absolution. Perhaps the cinematic classic, Raging Bull, is not only about rage and violence, but more about self-redemption.