The idea of the animal is not subtly buried within Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” – it is, after all, right there in the title. Its subject, the middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta, was called the “Raging Bull” or the “Bronx Bull” for the severity and brutality of his fighting style; in his first scene outside of the ring, in his Bronx apartment, the overturning of furniture and smashing of dishes (a bull in a china shop, if you will) prompts an angry neighbor to directly call LaMotta an animal. More subtly, the dense sound design of the boxing sequences include the sound of screeching animals, buried within the effects. And, perhaps most famously, the film culminates with its protagonist in a jail cell, proclaiming (insisting, perhaps) in agony, “I’m not an animal.”
The neighbors weren’t the only ones lobbing those insults. According to studio executive Steven Bach’s book “Final Cut,” when “Raging Bull” (which hit theaters 40 years ago this week) was going into production, a nervous executive at United Artists wondered, “Will anyone want to see any movie about such Neanderthal behavior?” and called the character, as it existed in the screenplay, “a cockroach.” Robert De Niro, who would go on to win an Oscar for playing him, objected, “calm and even resolute,” according to Bach. “He is not a cockroach,” De Niro said, and said it a second time for emphasis.
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And he’s right. What LaMotta is, in this unconventional biopic, is a man – and the picture posits that a man is far more dangerous and destructive than any animal could hope to be. “Raging Bull” remains, as it was upon its original (commercially unsuccessful) release, a hard movie to watch, gazing unflinchingly at an abusive, paranoid sociopath. It’s a movie that was ready to reckon with toxic masculinity before we even called it that – before we even really understood it, as a culture.
In some ways, “Raging Bull” is like two movies: a gorgeously stylized sports film, and a hard-to-watch kitchen-sink drama. No prizes for guessing what most people hold on to, but Scorsese’s interests and allegiances are clear, from its opening sequence: LaMotta shadow-boxing in slow-motion, to the accompaniment of Pietro Mascagni’s Intermezzo from “Cavalleria rusticana.” “Rocky,” this ain’t.
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But that divergence is important, because it underscores the kind of life Jake LaMotta led: in supreme control and absolute power within the ring, bumbling through outside of it. The boxing sequences (shot by Michael Chapman, cut by Thelma Schoonmaker) are celebrated, and justifiably so, for their prowling, snaking intimacy, and their stylized theatricality – smoke and heat rising, stage lights blazing, deep and inky black spaces pulsing behind. Scorsese rarely adopts the perspective of the spectator (he thought it to be dull, with some accuracy), and while it’s easy to say he arrived at the notion of camera as participant, it’s more than that; his camera is capturing these fights via LaMotta’s mind’s eye, framing him as the hero (or the victim).
Out of the ring, however, LaMotta has no such control – though not for lack of trying. “I want you to keep an eye on her,” he tells his manager and brother Joey (Joe Pesci), of his beautiful young wife Vicki (Cathy Moriarty), the object of his unquenchable lust, and then unceasing jealousy. He works himself into knots believing her to be unfaithful, with no evidence and no logic beyond his own self-hatred – after all, if you loathe yourself, then you can’t imagine someone being faithful to you. But it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: he wants it to be true, he wants to believe it, so that his paranoia and insecurity can be justified. (“You’re gonna give her an excuse to go out!” Joey predicts, correctly.)
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“I don’t trust you when it comes to her,” Jake tells his brother later. “I don’t trust anyone.” For all of the physical violence in “Raging Bull,” the most disturbing moments are those when Jake exerts his psychological control – like the full, detailed report she has to give whenever she comes back, not just from an afternoon out, but from a trip to the bathroom. (Even ordering room service becomes a loaded act, an entire thing.) He tries to trick Vicki by waking her up and interrogating her about imagined infractions while she’s still half-asleep. And when he finally gets the information he (thinks) he wants, and heads up the stairs of their row house to confront her, it’s as scary – and its outcome as certain – as any slasher movie kill.
She attempts to leave, to no avail; “I’m a bum without you and the kids, don’t go,” he pleads, continuing the patterns and cycles of abuse. De Niro is, unsurprisingly, terrifying in these scenes, but the power of Cathy Moriarity’s work is truly astonishing; she goes toe to toe with a screen icon, in her film debut no less, and absolutely measures up. The showiness of De Niro’s performance is secondary; his best scenes here are when he’s doing nothing, and she is brave (or inexperienced) enough to match him there. Marvel at how deathly quiet the first “date” / kiss scene (in his mother’s apartment) is – you can barely hear them, which doesn’t really matter since they’re not saying much of anything. The connection is real, and that’s what’s important; if you don’t believe she fell for him, you don’t believe she’d have stuck around for what followed.
Joe Pesci was similarly unknown at the time, a nightclub comic and occasional actor who’d thrown in the towel and gone to work as a restaurant manager before De Niro and Scorsese talked him into the role. That casting, too, is a masterstroke; because he had not yet established his distinctive persona, he comes on like some guy they found in a gym somewhere, a real deal wise guy – in the non-Mob sense. (And speaking of the Mob, one of the film’s underrated pleasures is Nicholas Colastano, the warm and wonderful “Coach” on “Cheers,” as Tommy the non-nonsense neighborhood gangster.)
In a career defined by innovation, “Raging Bull” remains one of Scorsese’s most strikingly stylized works. He initially chose to shoot the film in black-and-white primarily as an act of protest against the shaky quality of contemporary color stock, though of course the monochromatic look goes a long way towards placing the film in its (primarily) 1940s setting, to say nothing of connecting it to boxing pictures of the era. But now, this distance, the black and white is especially effective – the picture feels less like a period piece and more like a rediscovery, a movie that was shot at the time and hid in a vault. (That sense of time and place is further underscored by Scorsese’s savvy use of documentary-style inserts, as well as the still images that give it a tabloid newspaper quality.)
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As a technical achievement, “Bull” still amazes; my favorite of its many bravura moments is a pre-“Goodfellas” unbroken tracking shot, following LaMotta up from the lower depths of the locker rooms and all the way into the ring for his title fight, as the music swells, the camera lifts, and his dreams come true. But Scorsese is never content with showing off for the sake of showing off. He’ll seize on a seemingly minor detail – the bloody sponge, or the blood dripping from the ropes – and center it in the scene, using those little distinctions to ensure that each fight tells its own, distinct visual story.
But within each is an overarching narrative, of savagery and brutality but, most of all, punishment. Scorsese’s avatar Charlie puts his hand into the flames of the church candles in “Mean Streets,” and opens that film by explaining, in voice-over, “You don’t make up for your sins in Church; you do it on the street; the rest is bullshit and you know it.” For Jake, the street is the ring, and it’s where he goes to take his beatings, because he thinks, possibly knows, that he deserves them. The worst one, from Sugar Ray Robinson, comes after he’s shut out his brother and nearly lost his wife; he punishes himself by barely defending himself in the bout, which leaves him beaten to a pulp. It’s his penance, and he takes part of it leaning into the ropes, with his arms spread out – the Crucifixion position, eight years before Scorsese would direct “The Last Temptation of Christ.”
And when there’s no one around to hurt him, he hurts himself. The agonizing scene late in the picture, in which LaMotta finds himself in the Dade County stockade for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, features some of the rawest and more harrowing work of De Niro’s career. Here, and throughout the movie, Scorsese doesn’t apologize for Jake LaMotta, or sympathize with him. But it tries, at least, to understand him, as he smashes his head into the wall and insists, again and again, “I’m not an animal.”
Much earlier, almost casually, Jake makes a bizarre request of his brother: “I want you to hit me with everything you got,” he insists. “What’re you trying to prove? What’s it prove?” his brother demands. And Jake doesn’t have an answer. But maybe, if nothing else, by the end of “Raging Bull,” he finally does.
“Raging Bull” is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and Hulu.