Word: lamotta
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...crowd of fine young American directors and maybe the best of them, would end up making a movie about boxing. All of the American rituals of machismo apply a fortiori to Italian-Americans; the pathetic pulp idiocy of Rocky virtually created Raging Bull. It is the story of Jake LaMotta only as much as Taxi Driver was the story of Travis Bickle, for Scorsese's new film has the same epic thrust of the earlier one. But where Taxi Driver was about America after Vietnam, Raging Bull is really about Martin Scorsese; only this essential decadence keeps it from greatness...
...Jake LaMotta was once middleweight champion of the world, at a time when that title meant even more than it usually does. He could take a punch better than anyone--partly because punching his head was like punching a provolone--and he had a left hook that could leave even Sugar Ray Robinson, maybe the best pound-for-pound fighter of all time, quivering on the mat like a dead leaf too long on the tree. He came out of the tough neighborhoods of the Bronx, and when it was over, he had an old middleweight title, a divorce...
SOMEWHERE IN THE FILMING of Raging Bull, though, Jake LaMotta disappeared--literally, he was kicked off the set, but in another sense, the real LaMotta didn't fit Scorsese's purpose. Raging Bull is about a parochial way of life, the mores of Italians moving up in the Bronx after the war. As a period piece, the movie is astonishing in its particularity--every detail is right, from the shirt collars to the old-style Kleenex box in LaMotta's bathroom; from the night at the Copacabana (where all the Italians of that era used to go for their...
Raging Bull is not merely the Jake LaMotta story, or a provincial vignette of life in the Bronx (although it functions on those levels); neither is it America; rather, it is a look at Scorsese's demons, with America serving as a prop. Violence extends beyond the ring to the crowd (where a woman is trampled in the crowd riot) to the church social hall (where drunks are thrown out by bouncers) to the Copacabana (site of a huge brawl) to the kitchen and dinner table. Cathy Moriarty, stunning in her debut as LaMotta's wife Vicki, is as beautiful...
...flat as a pool table, she tells us all we need to know about a certain kind of woman in a certain kind of neighborhood. Joe Pesci, also in his first movie role, is perfect as the little man and the little brother, scared by and ultimately disgusted with LaMotta...