Raging bull [DVD]

Film biography of New York boxer Jack La Motta, a one-time middleweight boxing champion who ended up an alcoholic running a sleazy Bronx nightclub. Traces Jake La Motta’s years of success in the forties to his humiliation in the fifties, ending with his career as a nightclub entertainer in 1964. This is not a conventional bio-pic with an explanatory approach to character. The exterior drama is displaced by La Motta’s struggle with interior demons. A radical awareness inflects the modes of the bio-pic and film noir, through the fractured structure, to link aggression with sexual repression and the denial of self with redemption. Robert De Niro gives an outstanding performance as the violent and inarticulate La Motta who pursues the “American Dream” the only way he knows how: through his fists. In “Raging bull” Scorsese continues his obsession with the dark side of the urban American psyche and the result is a largely pessimistic but passionate piece of filmmaking. The boxing sequences are operatic in their violent excess and not for weak stomachs. Despite numerous Oscar nominations (and a Best Actor win for De Niro) the film received a mixed critical reaction and performed poorly at the box-office. Currently however, “Raging bull” is considered a masterpiece of American cinema.