Digging into the Classics: Raging Bull (Part 2 of an ongoing series)
Monday, January 31st, 2011Raging Bull
It’s tougher than you might think coming at these critically-renowned and much adored movies for the first time as so often now we - the cynical, seen-it-all, late-alphabet-letter generations - are prepped to react to praise and, for want of a better word, “hype” with an exaggerated gut-reaction. Watching the slow-motion, shadow-boxing introduction backed to classical music, my cynical side began to wonder if all the classics required was an air of pretension. It’s a beautiful sequence, but on its own you could call it ponderous.
However this scene quickly gave way to the shocking sight of a fat and portentous De Niro talking to himself (not so shocking if you know your movie trivia, but I wasn’t expecting to see that straight off the bat) and just like that the introduction served its purpose - the direct contradiction presented in the two scenes; the graceful, balletic La Motta in his prime and the obese, buffoonish La Motta in his disappointing twilight sketches the outline of a man that will be filled in throughout the next two hours. It’s also nice to say that the use of the black and white is both visually appealing and appropriate given the characters’ many shades of grey.
La Motta in that scene is rehearsing an act and an act of comedy at that - though not as comic as the caricature that he had become by this stage, though we, the audience, don’t yet know that. An unrepentantly self-destructive and, beneath it all, incredibly vain man, La Motta makes for an appealing showcase character and that touches on what I want to talk about. Some classics are given that status due to the expansive themes they touch on or the epic productions that tell stories spanning decades of civilisation or re-enact the great (and grotesque) moments of human history. They almost always have the ability to make a deep emotional impact while telling a story be it sweeping or small in scale, and there are moments of artistry so profound that they change your view of how cinema and all its elements operate.
In Raging Bull, while the direction and cinematography are indeed superb, the script honed in on the story it wants to tell with minimal fuss or divergence, the art direction and sound marry together to provide the perfect stage for this story to play… in the end it boils down to one central performance. When I think of movies that are defined by a performance, Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood comes to mind (a modern classic, for sure), Brando in On The Waterfront, Pacino in The Godfather, Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, or even as recently as Natalie Portman in Black Swan (not in the same league but the performance is genuinely brilliant). There aren’t many movies that fit into this category, but when you do start to think of them De Niro’s name pops up with surprising regularity: Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, and arguably The Godfather Part II.
Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta absolutely enlivens the screen with every moment, every gesture, every line, and is truly what Raging Bull is all about. As a man who lives by his impulses, often violent, the performance by the actor and the character/personality become one in a frighting verisimilitude. There is a tension to scenes where anything can happen when La Motta is in the room, and often it does but not always as you expect. There is no grand sweep to this story, there is no epic scale to this man’s life, he was just a petty man driven by urges and impulses who battered his way through life and hurt those around him. In this it’s very much the “downfall of a man” mould that is revisited in many films, but hardly with such veracity and intensity. I have little beyond this to say about the movie, it’s a visual tour de force - Scorcese commends his direction by pairing with an excellent cinematographer that give the boxing matches their own unique visual language, but he also knows that the virtuosity can’t be relentless and when to tone back on the kinetic. Scorcese allows the smaller scenes play out simply and the claustrophobic scale of the domestic sets give rise to an visual obvious metaphor for a caged wild animal, where the audience is often on the edge of their seat wondering which direction La Motta will charge in next.
Watching a movie like this and reflecting upon the storied career De Niro held until the 90s, it’s sad to see how far he has fallen in the past 20 years - Pacino is just as guilty of this transgression though he never stooped as far as De Niro for a paycheque - and in many ways this is a sad case of life imitating art. De Niro mugging at the camera in Little Fockers is almost as damning an indictment of how far a person can fall as La Motta reciting his ad-libbed Shakespeare and shadow-boxing in the dingy dressing room of a comedy club.