No matter how many times I see it, I know its hardest punch is coming at the very end and I am helplessly leading with my chin. Director Martin Scorsese flashes up a quotation from John 9:24-26, its verses individually illuminated in succession: “So for the second time, the Pharisees summoned the man who had been blind and said: / ‘Speak the truth before God. We know this fellow is a sinner.’ / ‘Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know,’ the man replied / ‘All I know is this: once I was blind and now I can see.’”
But has redemption really finally come for Jake LaMotta – the corrupt, self-hating, self-sabotaging and not especially repentant boxer so unforgettably played by Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s 1980 classic Raging Bull, incandescent with monochrome beauty. LaMotta ends his days without reconciliation with his wife whom he abused, without reconciliation with his longsuffering brother Joey (an equally unforgettable performance from Joe Pesci). The final act comes with his blandly sentimental, self-congratulatory nightclub act in which this bloated, ruined figure is simply pleased to have survived, as uninterested in moral judgment as the blind man who refuses to condemn Jesus.
Perhaps that is the mystery of Raging Bull: its equivalent of divine grace. The boxing movie is traditionally about redemption and the comeback of the underdog; just the year before, Stallone’s Rocky II – produced, like Ragjng Bull, by Irwin Winkler – told just this kind of story. But Raging Bull was a more brutally nihilist tale, its subject a brawling, misogynist fighter who took a dive for the short end money (like Brando in On the Waterfront), whose championship win was hopelessly compromised by mob corruption, whose decline was marked by ingratitude and abuse, and who finally becomes a caged monster punching the wall with despair. (Moviegoers at the time sensed an echo with David Lynch’s The Elephant Man.) And all this is shown in a stunning, dreamlike series of episodes in and out of the ring, as LaMotta fanatically squares up to various opponents, has head-butting encounters with Joey, falls in love with his second wife, Vickie, (Cathy Moriarty) – and comes to hate her, driven mad by his own possessive fear and insecurity and brought down by his own toxic machismo.
As well as being based on LaMotta’s autobiography, Scorsese’s film took inspiration from Mark Robson’s Champion (1949) with Kirk Douglas, and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Magnet of Doom (1963) with Jean-Paul Belmondo. But the sheer brio and kinetic energy of those nightmarish boxing scenes are utterly unique, like no boxing movie before or since. Maybe the sport itself was outclassed by this film’s despairing beauty.
The “dive” scene is at the very centre of the film’s meaning. LaMotta, like so many fighters before him, has to deliberately throw a fight so that the mob grandees, who have bet heavily on his unfancied opponent at long odds, will win big and reward him with a shot at the title. But it is a desperately risky business: the promised title shot may not materialise and his career momentum might stall, ending in the Palookaville of defeat: which is of course Brando’s sad fate in On the Waterfront. De Niro shows how LaMotta’s pride will not let him lose convincingly; he can’t and won’t go down. The crowd jeers at this obvious corruption and in his dressing room LaMotta bursts into tears like a little boy. But that is the point: in the emotional ritual of abuse, LaMotta has to be humiliated, mutilated like a gelding, shown who’s boss, and bend the knee to his mob bosses. This is masculinity’s theatre of cruelty.
When I first saw Raging Bull, I came out of the cinema simultaneously exhausted and yet supercharged with energy, as if I could throw buses across the street. It still makes me feel like that.
• Raging Bull is released on 14 April in UK cinemas, and screening now in select Australian cinemas.
