career zenith for De Niro & Scorsese

Rating: 6/10 (3 August 2010)

Jake LaMotta is a middleweight boxing pro. Inside the ring he's an unbridled sociopath. Outside it, he's a very, very typical and unremarkable product of his age. He's an emotionally weak, testosterone-crazed loud-mouthed roughneck, as conservative and bourgeois as they come. He's terribly paranoid about people, and has a knack for alienating his friends and peers. He's also intensely chauvinistic, seeing women as no more than f**k toys and domestic chattels. His extreme paranoia about other people's motives, his basic unsociability, his lack of self-awareness coupled with his intense jealousy for his beautiful wife inevitably destroy him. At the end, he is thrown onto the garbage heap of civilization.
People say that Raging Bull is the "we'll make our point so obvious that there's no way you can miss it" type of film. In a way this is true, because there is no ambiguity about it. It is equally true that the director is so aware of his intentions, so clear about the material he is handling, and at the same time has so much command over his craft that his film succeeds in communicating with almost anyone who watches it. Raging Bull is Scorsese and De Niro at their peaks, individually as well as in collaboration.