Movie #75 – Raging Bull (1980) - 129 min, cert 18.
This movie tells the life story of Jake LaMotta, the middleweight boxing champion, based on his auto-biography. It concentrates mainly on his relationships with his wife and his brother.
When I saw this film coming up in the list, I asked a friend who had seen it what they thought of it. They described it as ‘better than Rocky. Having now watched it myself, I find this a strange comparison. The two films are entirely different. Rocky is a movie about boxing, Raging Bull is not. It’s a film about a man who happens to be a boxer. If I was going to compare it to another film, I’d use The Treasure of the Sierra Madre which I saw last week. Both are films about men whose lives spiral out of control due to paranoia. Bogart’s madness derives from his greed, while De Niro’s comes from his low self-esteem. He assumes that his young and beautiful wife would rather have an affair than be faithful to him and treats everyone she speaks to as a suspected lover, including his own brother.
I found it quite slow to get going, In fact I started watching this film yesterday, but 22 minutes in, I was so bored that I switched it off and went and did something else instead. I was probably just in the wrong frame of mind for it. After all, 22 minutes doesn’t give it much of a chance. Part of the problem was that Joe Pesci has reprised this character so many times since then – Goodfellas, Casino, Once Upon a Time in America, etc. that the original seems like old hat. It just felt like I wasn’t watching anything new, and that I’d seen it all before. It was just another bunch of guys from Little Italy who beat on their wives, hang out with their mistresses and demand RESPECT from everyone. This was a boxer rather than a mobster but little else was different.
Of course I’m judging this movie largely against the movies that came after it, which is a little unfair of me, but that’s how I’m coming to it, so that’s how I have to view it.
Score – 6/10. If I’d seen it twenty years ago then I might have rated it higher.
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