BIG'S BIG MOVIE LIST

     “Raging Bull” (1980), voted AFI's #4 Greatest Movie of All Time and AFI #1 Greatest Sports Movie of All Time, is the epic biography of Jake “Raging Bull” La Motta (De Niro), a hotheaded American middleweight champion boxer living in New York in the 1940's. Alongside his brother and sparring partner Joey (Joe Pesci), Jake ascends the ranks toward middleweight glory, but not without a significant struggle along the way. Jake is a fierce, hungry competitor; angry, wild (many characters call him an animal throughout the film), but also not without his charm, and at his core a very emotionally insecure person. Highly suspicious and controlling, Jake's insecurity often boils over into rage and some pretty relentless displays of domestic violence toward his wife (Cathy Moriarty) and brother.

 

This film has a lot of great things working for it. For any Scorsese fan who is familiar with his other classics such as Casino and Goodfellas will find much more of the same in terms of style and delivery, only filmed in black and white, a choice that helped to separate Raging Bull from the Rocky films and to aid in the historical feel of life in the 40s-60s. The music is largely of Italian composer Pietro Mascagni, who lends a sad, but vibrant complementary tone to the whole story. Scorsese is notorious for using music to heighten and often dominate scenes in his films, so the classical music was an excellent choice.

 

I'll say this as objectively as I can: this movie is really damn Italian. For example: De Niro uses the word “mamaluke” twice. The eyy's and ohhh's fly almost as frequently as the expletives, and everyone is shouting more often than not, though usually not over anything of significant consequence. If anything holds this movie back from greatness in my eyes, its Scorsese's unapologetic depiction of spousal abuse and general violence toward women. While sometimes necessary to effectively paint the rich portrait of this brutish man, I think many scenes were over-the-top and at times superfluous in their depiction of Jake's wife (Cathy Moriarty) and the abuses she endured. A similar message could be conveyed without repeatedly and gratuitously showing footage of a woman being smacked and thrown around a Bronx walkup.

 

While this could be classified as a boxing movie, fewer than 10 minutes of the film are scenes of actual boxing (interestingly enough, those ten minutes took six weeks to film and edit down), so the viewer may be disappointed if they were looking for a more action-centered film. Cathy Moriarty is bold and beautiful in her onscreen debut, and De Niro and Pesci have scene after excellent scene together (the pair reportedly trained together intensely before production began, and as a result became lifelong friends, continuing to work together decades later), many of which were ripe for parody in the years to come (see Jim Breuer's classic SNL Joe Pesci Show sketch “Did You Shampoo My Wife?”, though its nearly impossible to get SNL videos online). Overall, in spite of its heavy handed violence, its gold Scorsese, worthy of any cinephile's time (and maybe even your top 10!)