And none of them were played by Robert De Niro. Not one of them had the frailties, the self-knowledge that make La Motta’s fall so human and so painful.
If, to some, he seemed simply brutish and stupid in 1980, well, we’ve had a decade full of hulks more brutish and far more stupid, and they’ve become the era’s movie heroes. Strangely enough, an extra decade may have changed how audiences react to Jake La Motta, certainly one of the screen’s least lovable figures. The most memorable of this memorable bunch, who might just have had their flash-photos taken by Weegee, is the gray-haired Tommy Como (Nicholas Colasanto), capo of the territory. But in contrast to the heightened theatricality in the ring, Scorsese and his writers, Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, reveal these mobsters with a nice street-savvy, every friendly insinuation perfectly pegged. We see La Motta’s squishy, violent bouts, each match doled out under the supervision of the local gangsters who control the fight “game.” Admittedly, these fights are staged as melodrama, instructive melodrama with gouts of spouting blood. With La Motta, it pushes into the provinces of Othello and paranoia.
Already married, Jake dallies with, then marries, a baby-blond from the neighborhood, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), then torments them both with every jealous fear a sexually abstaining athlete must be prey to-and a few more. Then we move to the scenes that frame the picture, a grotesquely fat 42-year-old La Motta in 1964, rehearsing for his one-man show, reading from Shakespeare, Paddy Chayefsky and from Budd Schulberg’s “On the Waterfront.”Īnd from that we go into a roughly chronological account of the fighter’s life, bound tightly with his younger brother Joey’s (Joe Pesci). “Raging Bull” opens with what must be one of the most luxurious title sequences in memory-a vision of the young, prideful boxer in his flashy leopard-Dynel robe, warming up in a corner of the ring to an oozing bit of “Cavalleria Rusticana” on the sound track.
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