Raging Bull

Raging Bull

Opening Shot

Black and white. Slow motion. Jake LaMotta shadowboxes in a corner of the ring, alone, his robe hood up. Pietro Mascagni's Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana plays. Michael Chapman shoots the fighter through the ropes, which frame him like prison bars. The image is beautiful and sad simultaneously, a man preparing for a violence that has already consumed his life. Scorsese opens with an elegy for a character you haven't met yet.

What It Does

Chapman's black-and-white cinematography is the most physically aggressive camera work in American cinema. Inside the ring, the camera takes punches. Blood sprays toward the lens. The ropes distort the frame. Chapman and Scorsese shot different fights with different visual strategies: the Sugar Ray Robinson fights are fast and chaotic, the Cerdan fight is shot in a wider frame to emphasize LaMotta's stalking patience, the final Robinson fight is a slaughter filmed in slow motion with spray that looks like abstract expressionist painting. Every fight is a different film.

The home sequences are shot with a stillness that makes the domestic violence more disturbing than the ring violence. Chapman uses static compositions and longer takes, so when Jake hits Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) or his brother Joey (Joe Pesci), the camera doesn't flinch, doesn't cut away, doesn't give you the relief of a different angle. The violence in the home is worse than the violence in the ring because the ring has rules.

De Niro's physical transformation (he gained sixty pounds for the older Jake) is famous, but the performance is built on subtler choices. Young Jake moves his jaw constantly, grinding, clenching, preparing to bite. Middle Jake's hands are always fists, even at the dinner table. Old Jake, enormous and slow, finally has soft hands. De Niro plays the entire character arc through his body's relationship to tension: a man who was always fighting, even when the fights stopped.

Why It's on the List

Scorsese and De Niro made the definitive film about masculine self-destruction, and they did it in black and white in 1980 because the story deserved the visual honesty of a period the characters had already left behind. Raging Bull failed commercially and Scorsese considered it his last film. It's now consistently ranked among the best American films ever made. The film proved that a sports biography could operate as psychological horror, that the body could be the text, and that the most violent thing about a violent man is what he does to the people who love him.

The Argument Against

Jake LaMotta is almost unredeemably awful, and the film's refusal to sentimentalize him, while honest, means some viewers spend two hours with a protagonist who generates no sympathy. The women in the film (Moriarty's Vickie, the first wife) are seen exclusively through Jake's distorted perception, which limits their characterization. And the final scene, where Jake recites Brando's "contender" speech from On the Waterfront in a dressing room mirror, is either the most devastating moment in the film or a heavy-handed literary reference. It depends on whether you think Jake understands what he's saying.

Closing Image

Jake in a dressing room, older, fatter, alone. He shadowboxes. He punches the mirror. "I'm the boss," he says. He's not the boss of anything. A title card quotes the Gospel of John: the blind man, questioned by the Pharisees, can only say that once he was blind, and now he can see. Whether Jake can see is the question Scorsese leaves open. The mirror is still there.