Thirty-five minutes into arguably
the best American film of the last thirty years a young woman is ordered by her
lover to take off his pants; her tongue begins a slow cruise down his chest,
beginning where a forest of dark hairs gives way to the plain formed by a
washboard stomach. Before her tongue gets to glide below the beltline, her
lover leaps up and runs into the bathroom pouring a pitcher of ice water over
his now flaming crotch. To screenwriter Paul Schrader the scene illustrates the
theory of Deadly Sperm Backup or DSB. “That’s what happens when you don’t sleep
with women – your sperm goes up to your brain and makes you crazy.” DSB is the
least of Jake La Motta’s problems as the insanely self-destructive anti-hero of
Raging Bull, (plays one day only, November 24th at the
Castro) Martin Scorsese and Schrader’s astonishing portrait of a man whose
fists and thick head win him his fondest dreams before macho jealousy destroys
his treasure.
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At last count there have probably
been more films made about boxing than all other sports combined. It shouldn’t
be all that surprising after all the ring is a natural stage, the cast is small
and affordable, and the metaphors between boxing and life all too obvious. It’s
no exaggeration to call Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull the Citizen
Kane of fight films. And unlike Wells, Scorcese managed to avoid a third
act anti-climax that still makes Kane’s final reel a bit of a butt number. Very
loosely based on the autobiography of middle weight champion Jake LaMotta, the
film of Raging Bull skips over Jake’s real life of not always so petty
crime, including the fact that he long labored under the assumption that he had
killed a man during a botched holdup attempt. The film bookends with scenes
long after Jake has retired from the ring and is making a semi-pathetic living
as a third-rate comedian. Using the classic film-within-a-film trick, Scorsese
has Jake’s character, played by an unrecognizably bloated Robert DeNiro (who
eat his way through Europe to play the older Jake as if he has morphed into
Hulk Hogan)) reading the great Marlon Brando monologue from On the
Waterfront in which Brando’s character, Terry Malone, now a punch drunk
dock worker, blames his mob boss brother (Rod Steiger) for the ruin of his once
promising ring career. Having sat through some of the most wrenchingly violent
domestic scenes ever filmed, Raging Bull’s audience is all too aware of
the multiple levels of irony in operation as a great actor impersonates a bad
one: DeNiro’s Jake riffing on Brando doing what is now a great film cliché.
Jake, was of course, a lot more and
a lot less than a contender – he was Middle Weight Boxing Champion – a man
literally driven crazy by success, which seemed to unleash demons within that
provoked him to destroy every relationship that had meant anything to him on
the way up. In an early scene, the year is 1941 and Jake has just lost a
controversial decision to a mob backed pug.
Much later seeds of trouble in
Jake’s second marriage to hauntingly beautiful Vickie (Cathy Moriarity) pop up
as Jake becomes enraged when Vickie casually describes his next opponent as
“pretty.” The fight with Tony Jeniro becomes not so much a boxing match
as a public mugging for which tickets have been sold. Jake’s brutal demolition
of the young prospect’s face – as mob boss Tommy Como (Nicholas Colasanto)
quips to a henchman at ringside, “He ain’t pretty anymore,” as the duo duck the
backwash of ring blood – becomes a horrifying demonstration to Vickie and her
friends that a beast is loose in their world.
The scene underscores primal,
beyond ordinary sibling, rivalry between Jake and Joey, (co-star Joe Pesci more
than holds his own with De Niro) which at times assumes faintly sexual
overtones, which Jake subverts into paranoid Jealousy: hallucinating that Joey
is cheating on him with Vickie.
This is no creaky cheat of a film
classic – with dialogue resembling blank verse, a soundtrack mixing real sound
with the music of the director’s parents’ courtship and aching portrait of
Scorsese’s childhood where the cops would clear the streets of kids before a
mob hit -- but as rigorous examination of the roots of American violence as
Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, with dark comedy beats
paralleling the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man.